International Cultic Studies Association International Conference 2025: Anna Kitko Presents

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:06]Idea is an KCO is my work focuses on the intersection between theology and uh psychology in particular with emphasis on spiritual abuse and cultures. Um you are not going to offend me if you have questions. I normally like to be dynamic when I teach classes. Some of my students already know that. But this time around, I have time to this and it's a very technical opportunity to leave early and bother me. Please enjoy the conference. I know how these things work. Um, so if I get too technical and you're like, "Oh, I'm in the wrong spot." That's okay. Go find the time. You need to be in Understand.

[00:00:40]Um, it's an honor to be here. Um, I have made this technical, so I'm going to try to get through it. Um, and then we'll hold questions for the very end just to make sure you have the context that you need to see what I'm getting at when it comes to demonic deliverance and exorcism. Raise your hand if you've been exercised of these.

[00:00:59]Ah, so he's so excited. I'm so excited.

[00:01:02]That's a wonderful. All right, we'll get started. I This is wonderful because we context and understand. Welcome.

[00:01:10]All right, let's get started. The phenomenon of the deliverance ministry which encapsulates exorcism pendulonic management has increased significantly in the US and Great Britain and abroad as an alternative to therapeutic interventions for the treatment of regular mental health problems. The belief stemming from an underlying mistrust of mental health interventions and of an interest and support please no focusing on spiritual afflictions of many different clinical tree mental health conditions in and of themselves are considered in these movements as doorways or entrances or ancest points for demons to enter the mind and body of the individual who is seeking help.

[00:01:50]Consequentially, these deliberate sessions have come to be seen as a sacred alternative to modern medical and psychological interventions. In numerous cases, the format these deliberate sessions take often are traumatic in nature, involving everything from suggestive methods of analysis all the way to incidences comparable to torture.

[00:02:09]Individuals have begun to seek out clinical help after these experiences ceased to address the initial reason they sought help initially. And in these clinical cases, clients are commonly reporting symptoms expressive of post-traumatic stress as a result of the deliverance intervention. The impact of such events being so unmanageable in the lives of those in attendance that these individuals that seeking the very clinical identity that they were trying to the emerging discussions surrounding the appropriate care in these cases involved the notable focus on the coercive elements of the delivered sessions themselves as well as an absence of studies documenting the intensity of the impact of a session on the overall mental health of the individual being subjected to law.

[00:02:52]However, the apparent position of deliverance ministry within the wider context of spiritual abuse merits a focused research endeavor and development of ways to measure abuse in this specific context. The purpose of the talk this morning is to introduce the public to an empirical investigation of the modern exorcism craze amongst Christians and document the level of abuse and psychological distress amongst survivors of exorcisms conducted inside of deliverance ministries who've sought counseling support and specialist clinics in the US and abroad by administering a series of well-established non-invasive instruments as well as in particular the piloting of a new psychopedric designed to bridge the gap between the rounds again measuring things.

[00:03:38]>> This metric called the deliverance ministry abuse scale or deis for short when empirically analyzed for internal accuracy and validity correlated to the existing measures of spiritual abuse trauma and well-being. Which implies that with further testing on a larger scale, our field of coerc control research has successfully found a way to measure spiritual abuse in what may be the most popular coercively controlled environment and charismatic theological settings. But before I introduce those findings, I need to catch you up on the history and application of exorcism in the modern era. Since the dawn of recorded time, mankind has documented the interplay between the forces of good and evil both inside of the individual person as well as the environment in which the person finds themselves. An acknowledgment that there exists in the experience of mankind phenomena that cannot be explained wholly naturally.

[00:04:29]These supernatural elements being explicated and managed by trained experts who were a combination of exorcist, diagnostician, and shaman, those who could identify the complexities of the interplay between the divine and the earthly through the methodological blending of the development of the natural sciences and religious ritual rights. History records the seemingly successful, albeit fraught intendance of the much more troublesome of these supernatural entities, demons, and the consequences of their presence, namely the phenomena of mental illness and its consequent treatment, exorcism, thereby intertwining for the ages the notion that mental illness and the spiritual realm could not be separated.

[00:05:09]Thus beginning the discussion on what constitutes appropriate clinical intervention and what constituted the abuse of the mentally ill itself a complex and very modern discussion as well.

[00:05:21]In the contemporary iteration of exorcist diagnostician shaman, we find the phenomena of the deliverance ministry wherein self-directed and itinerant practitioners identify, exercise, and proceed to manage the demonic by inviting those who suffer from any perceived mental malady to subject themselves to grueling, often hourslong rituals by which the afflicting demon is identified and cast out. an experience that results in a spectrum of response patterns by those who undergo such an endeavor, ranging from reports of instantaneous and miraculous success all the way to suicidal ideiation and post-traumatic stress disorder, thereby compounding and increasing the complexity of the initial complaint. Given the fact that like its ancient exorcism predecessors, Deliverance is being marketed to the public as a more holistic and precisionoriented treatment for mental illness as well as an alternative to therapeutic psychiatric intervention. It behooves clinical researchers to study, isolate, and document what, if anything, is occurring in these so-called demon fighting environments, and whether subjection to these rituals are indeed doing the job they are intending, or if what is occurring is more nefarious and psychologically damaging than we realize. Psychometric scales in these environments have yet to be developed in order to measure any abuses being incurred, and therefore, it is both expedient and clinically prudent for such measures to be developed. Very little clinical research documenting deliverance ministries or even exorcism tradition exists in this field.

[00:06:46]Unsurprisingly, research has focused more on the historical modes of mantic management and exorcism of the demonic from differing religious perspectives rather than on the clinical implications of such an experience or the outcome of the exorcisms themselves. This is both unhelpful in our case as we have very little existing directly related research to bolster our study as well as wonderfully liberating in that we're free to pioneer for the rest of the clinical academic world work in an incredibly fascinating and neglected field. Happily, this fact also allows for a refreshing deep dive into the philosophical realm here as well.

[00:07:22]Considering the fact that several modern researchers have highlighted the ancient sources for clinical and social psychological origins happen to be exorcism tablets as well, a feature we will investigate shortly. These points are crucial for the future of clinical psychology in that the regular interactions between our field and the theologically and philosophically oriented ones regularly interact and overlap as in the case of the Royal College of Psychiatrists recommendations on spiritual health care and seeking deliverance as an option for continued care. Studies like this one that serve to unite the fields in the common goal of service to the care of the human race stands in a no man's land of what is often more akin to a philosophical war of ambivalence between academics rather than an olive branch of collaborative efforts across these highly respected and critically necessary fields.

[00:08:12]Moreover, the more foroding aspects to the psychiatric world moving toward the incorporation of mantic and ritualistic exorcism, features of the religious culture that do not carry any consistent internalized privacy practices, informed consent or ethical margins for recommendation of potential continued care, begs and I would contend demands the research to make certain that our vows to do no harm are maintained in our practices and referral criterion.

[00:08:37]Further, the psychology of course of control field is well-versed in how quickly environments lending toward celebrity style attention, personal glory, elevation of status alongside lucrative monetary game, as is want to be had in Delick's ministry circles by virtue of the craft and its impact in community rapidly devolves into case studies of malignant narcissism praying upon the most vulnerable populations.

[00:09:01]If we as clinicians and researchers are going to begin encountering deliberants in increasing ways in our culture, then it is incumbent upon us to really dig deeply into trying to understand what precisely is going on and where further investigation ought to focus both in pressing ways right now as well as in the future. For the purposes of the study, however, justification for the development of a new psychometric instrument to measure abuse in these settings requires some historical context for understanding the need for both the overall measure and its critical submetrics.

[00:09:32]Nope.

[00:09:34]>> Deliverance ministries are a global phenomena extending from excessive availability in the US and Great Britain all the way to remote availability in such far away places as the overland communities and unreached people groups from the Indian mountains all the way to Nepal and beyond. Originally however demonic study and clinical focus began in the region extending from the Assyrian north to the southern reaches of Babylon. Here, exorcism work blended in and out of mental health management in the form of apotropeic and curative magic, preventing supernatural attacks from evil spirits from taking hold for too long. The exorcist called the asipu or masmasu acted as an ancient spiritual psychologist who was called when normal physiological or spiritual practices would not suffice and when symptoms in the patient implied psychosmatic sourcing. The most compelling point in Mesopotamian documentation is the fact that our most extensive clinical manuals describing the studies required to be a to become a professional exorcist include a mastery of identifying diseases of the mind and their correlating medicinal plants and tinctures for treatment alongside the the correlating ritual that would provide therapeutic release for the afflicting malevolent entity. Exorcists were not only responsible for the diagnosis of mental illness, but also for a knowledge of the appropriate pharmacological interventions that coincided with verbal rituals, hauntingly similar to what appears to be a fledgling and ancient form of psychotherapy.

[00:11:02]The critical difference being that in the case of the trained exorcist, they would be able to identify when in fact the malady was as a result of an intertwining of a foreign spiritual body, or rather a demon. Meaning that the exorcist was the highest of the trained professional classes in ancient Mesopotamian culture. And it was to them who one turned one exclusively medical or exclusively spiritual care was not enough. They were the holistic clinicians of the ancient world responsible for the weaving of the clinician and the diver into one in the identification of affliction both in the individual as well as in the culture at large.

[00:11:39]Demons and demonic studies are in relative academic agreement as to the types of afflicting demons. documented throughout the history of medicine and apparently available to engage with on a clinical level. Because demons can operate in everinccreasing circles of influence in the culture, demonic management tends towards a classification of what we might call intelligent impurities. These are demons that afflict large scores of people through exposure to them in the environment. These are phenomena that could be interpreted as everything from rudimentary notions of viology and bacteriology all the way to equally rudimentary notions of the treatment of entities more akin to infestation things like fungal infection amiebas and molds.

[00:12:18]We can infer this based upon exorcism texts documenting that their treatment involved pharmacological intervention and sanitizing protocols as opposed to merely mantic recitation and ritual.

[00:12:30]alternatively was the management of intelligent entities that afflicted the spirit in a more profoundly parasitic manner and were consequently displayed by the body. Meaning that the physiological symptoms were presumed to be psychossematic and therapeutic intervention was deemed appropriate. In these cases of demonic influence, the practitioner was responsible for naming the demon, taking control through dominating the foreign spiritual body and resting it from the vessel it was seeking to perpetually afflict.

[00:13:00]This type of intendance being necessary as in the classification of demonic entity, the entity itself was not merely an incubating foreign body, but was instead the dismembered and disembodied residue of a deceased Nephilim, a race of mythological figures who were themselves as ancient sources document the result of the illicit sexual merger of fallen angelic beings and human women who ruled mankind prominently in the anti-delivided period and afterward.

[00:13:29]Therefore, this classification of demonic entity being more akin to that of a transcorporeal leech, it was necessary for the removal of said entity to be much more precise, albeit forceful. The concominant nature, therefore, of spiritual affliction and psychological malady to warrant a healing intervention that would handle both the natural and the supernatural in whichever classification was identified was the critical component to best practice in aging clinical senses. to deal with mental malady was to deal with the supernatural demonic realm and there was no way around it.

[00:14:04]If ancient Mesopotamian exorcism is the site preparation of the deliverance structure, then building off of this metric comes to in the foundation for the modern deliverance ministry that of the healing work and demonic management of Jesus of Nazareth and his followers in the first century AD. There are 24 unique instances of demonic management documented in the pages of the New Testament. All of which employ to differing degrees the exorcism protocols of the second temple periods focus on entities from the time of Enoch. if you'll remember that is anti-olubian themselves significantly echoing and justifying the exorcism expectations of ancient Mesopotamia including but not limited to the expectation for practitioners to wield the appropriate pharmacological and psychotherrapeutic formulas for the expulsion of the differing classifications of demons as well as the more direct exercising of anian body statures.

[00:14:55]critical component here being that dispositionally first century exorcisms reflected a decidedly non-western notion of the interplay between the body and mind where western medicine focuses on cartisian duality right mind body dualism exorcism medicine in this context did not meaning that there is an inappropriateness to any singular psychosmatic conclusion regarding identification of symptoms for classifying demons and responding with the appropriate exorcistic intervention Rather, symptoms should be interpreted as a result of biocschosocial paradigms that prioritize the fact that the patient is not an independent entity, but in actuality belongs to a complex system of interreations between relationships and structures and where what is considered healthy can be impacted by a broad range of non-biological factors. Scholars noting this difference between clinical philosophies have coined the very helpful phrase culture specific syndromes in order to give language to the occurrence and to distinguish between the differences in diagnostic criterion from modern sensibilities for clarity in contemporary clinical language. This is best illustrated in the brand new classes of diagnosis known as sematization disorder and sematic symptom disorder. The point being that the structure of exorcism in this century highlighted the fact that an accurate diagnosis of the demonic involved a robust knowledge of not only the demonic bodies themselves but also the dark ecological systems that both the patient presenting the symptoms and the demons themselves were apart. To address the patient in any other mode of healing besides the immediate context of their surroundings, their cultural expectations, their history, and their spiritual geographical counterparts was to fail to understand what one was healing. In effect, demonic symptomology was both a recognition of the biological disease as well as the spiritual disees where here again the two could not be separated. Treatment of the disease without returning the patient to unity with their correct spiritual ecology and right standing with the divine meant the demon would continue to afflict or perhaps intensify its impact. Exorcism texts such as the New Testament documentation of these afflictions focus on the critical nature for penitent repentance to be an instrumental focus of the exorcist. For in the same way that each external confession assuagages the internal guilt of wrongdoing, that very recognition of the disruption to the biocschosocial nexus in which the guilty find themselves begins the restoration of what has been damaged and thereby beginning the restoration of what has been damaged internally as well.

[00:17:39]Where the site preparation and foundation securing protocols for exorcism are well established and as harmonious an agreement as could be imagined for this topic. The framing stage of the historical development of the modern deliverance ministry is anything but. Nearly 20 centuries of silence on this topic gives us little to no continuity for tracing what we are experiencing today in deliverance protocols. And this is critical as in order to illustrate the need for abuse psychometrics to be developed, one has to appreciate the discontinuity.

[00:18:07]Modern deliverance ministries regularly depart from the biocschosocial and ecological context for historical exorcism medicine and instead employ a drastically nonclinical albeit demonstrabably western dualistic notion of the body and the mind where they seek to hijack the rituals and therapeutic interventions that are noteworthy in historical exorcism while simultaneously denying and withholding the pharmacologically correlating interventions baked into that highly specialized process. In effect, modern deliverance ministries are brand new to the history of exorcism and can only be said to be built off of the traditions of the spiritual physician they claim to be representing that of Jesus of Nazareth. If we completely ignore the context and application of those healings, deliverance as we know it in its current form is but an echo of the first century and a very distant one at that.

[00:18:58]Current iterations of deliverance can be understood in the category of spiritual edgework that of extreme ritual performances localized in communities already primed for those activities.

[00:19:08]Socializing theories of religion are helpful aid here in that they help us understand that one important characterization of religious edge work.

[00:19:15]Things like firew walking and poison drinking and snake handling along with deliverance is that it serves as a degree indicator for a society to measure empowerment and control in the differing religious institutions within the culture. Deliberance is a distinctly Protestant phenomenon with a clear locus in the late 20th century charismatic movement in the United States in particular. These important distinctions between each of the charismatic groups of American Protestantism aids in the distinguishing within a given charismatic population. Which of the groups have stronger connections to the transcendent and therefore greater power of wielding such connection? These distinctions serve to heighten adherence sense of power and control over themselves and their surroundings thereby cementing in the rituals of each respective charismatic population continuing edgework practices. For this reason, deliverance although a phenomenon present in almost every Protestant denomination in some form or facet both in the US and beyond thrives primarily in the subgroups that came as a result of the Pentecostal movement and its destitutionalized metrics for engaging with the spiritual realm. For in Pentecostal and therefore charismatic iterations of spiritual practice, we find strong aversions toward any type of formalized training or accountability measures for clergy, preferring instead of very woodenly applied insistence on the priesthood of every believer to be one free of any formal ecclesiology and therefore the exorcist potential of every believer with or without any formalized training procedures.

[00:20:41]What is more is that there is also no clear classification between demonizing components. Deliverance is more akin to trollling than any type of precision extraction as in ancient procedures wherein each individual being subjected to the deliverance practitioner is entirely at the mercy of their purported discernment self-escribed prophetic capabilities divination ritual for accessing the spiritual realm and identification of afflicting demon.

[00:21:07]Therefore, instead of demonic management being an elevated form of spiritual medicine requiring a diagnosis that both addresses the internal spiritual compass, its correlating physiological and psychological symptoms and the overall orientation of the individual with a restored knowledge of divine standing. In this iteration of exorcism, we see a transition focus exclusively on a specific mode of expression that reflects whatever the religio cultural specific expression of the area looks like as opposed to healing in a verifiably clinical sense. Meaning that the normative attitudes and behaviors of the deliverance practitioner's area determines the rightness or the ortha or the healed standard of health. While the classification of the demon or affliction, the taxa, determines the level of demonization. And therefore, anyone anything that does not comport with the practitioner's personal view of health qualifies as demonic. You've seen those guys who are wearing glasses, but they're casting out the demon of lack lack of sight. Is that kind of stuff that I'm getting? Yeah. Okay. This also means that individuals who already belong to the practitioner's iteration of charismatic theology can be considered demonized and any and all human experience phenomena can be interpreted as demonic with no further diagnostic criteria necessary apart from the practitioners say so. The risks of such a process are clear particularly when compared to established secular therapeutic practice like the APA's principles of psychologists and code of conduct and also and have also been recognized within the wider Christian community.

[00:22:45]In 1972 for instance at the peak of the charismatic movement the society for the promotion of Christian knowledge published the findings of the exit report the bishop of extor's commission study on deliverance case studies in Great Britain. The result of that publishing moved the informal Christian exorcism study group of Great Britain comprised of clinicians and clergymen alike to rename themselves the Christian deliverance study group in the hopes of the integration of each of the fields involved in demonic management namely clinical medicine psychology and theology might work quietly together to test out the conclusions of the exod report and pastoral practice and see whether its experience would lead to any convergence of methods of approach of diagnosis and practice. These series of studies stemmed from a sudden surge of deliverance focused charismatics as well as from a marketkedly increased call for exorcisms of both people and places around Great Britain. Due to the Church of England's acknowledged neglect of training exorcists, clergy as a whole were at a loss as to how to proceed and to what degree such procedures should be undertaken. The bishop of exit made his now famous call to securely define and classify each category of demonization for the sake of the parishes apparently suddenly afflicted.

[00:23:58]The most noteworthy of these protocols being an insistence upon the reduction of any possible harm to the cases of mental illness where no exorcism was appropriate and therefore a psychiatric referral ought to be made. The conclusion of the commission report being clear return to the very same ancient Mesopotamian categories for analysis, insistence upon the protection of the afflicted from any arrogant misdiagnosis by Anglican clergy, required training for any clergy performing deliverance, and an accountability structure for the purposes of protecting the afflicted from any potential spiritual abuse. A metric for measuring the spiritual impact of a deliverance session was not provided however and this is a key driver for the need for this research to be accessible and readily available to practicing clinicians, clergy and general public.

[00:24:45]So too now roughly 50 years from the expert report are those concerns increasing exponentially. Deliverance ministries are pres are present in a spectrum of forms and that spectrum is widening to include government-run psychiatric referral protocols as well as deliverance becoming increasingly used as an alternative to established clinical mental health interventions for everything from suicidal ideiation to schizophrenia to trauma intervention for childhood rape and everywhere in between. General deliverance phenomena currently falls into two categories and due to a lack of time I'm going to refer you to a previous presentation I made for ICA on that topic to review if you're wanting more specifics. ICSA has it. Um but for our purposes this morning there are itinerant and eclectic versions of these two norms called inner healing sessions where each practitioner interweavves their own specific formats.

[00:25:33]There are also versions where the patient is simply given a list of repetitive ritual chants designed to exercise why demonic entities that can be generally purged from their person um by way of an overall and demonstrabably unspecific statement of rejection or of spiritual contracts that the patient has either willingly or accidentally entered into with malicious evil spirits offering their unalth experience. uh these soul ties or what they call them are seen as the source of any distress and therefore the casting out of these entities must be done in a verbal ritual preferably overseen by a self-escribed prophet or apostle who has command over the spiritual ecology of the area. In these instances each patient is being treated in a way that is culture specific as each ruling apostle prophet writes their own rituals to dispense to the ley as they see fit. In all of these categories and illustrations, the similarities are equally as striking as the obvious problems inherent to such systems. Firstly, there is a demonstrable lack of continuity with the history of exorcism and the clearly derivative psychotherrapeutic protocols involving clinical and pharmacological intervention and their categories for diagnosis respectively. Secondly, severe lack of concern over the dangers surrounding the neglect of protection of the patients psychological distress both inside sessions as well as afterward.

[00:26:54]And thirdly, the complete disregard for abiding by any accountability metric for practitioners and their purported command of the divine, let alone the fact that the implications of their care constitute the claim that not only do divine persons perform for them, but also that their conclusions regarding the patients care is tantamount to a diagnosis directly from God. These instances, if inauthentic, carry with them consequences tantamount to spiritual, psychological, and emotional abuse for the patient and in turn would be examples of origin points for mental illness rather than solutions for it.

[00:27:28]There is a clear acknowledgement by the Church of England as well as representatives of alternative Protestant denominations of just how quickly incidences of deliverance could become abusive. However, which is helpful in that all of this history is precisely why the development of a psychometric psychometric to measure these things is both clinically prudent as well as ultrat expedient.

[00:27:49]Spiritual abuse is an oft deliverance ministry involvement and exposure. In my experience, many of my clients in the practices that I serve in as a clinician report significant levels of coercion, including but not limited to the types of thought reform techniques observed by psychologists well known in our field.

[00:28:07]The regular misuse of holy scriptures in these circles appears to be rampant and reflects a concerted effort by abusive practitioners to maintain control over the individuals in the communities in which these forms of deliverance are being practiced by blaming the victims of trauma and mental illness of hidden sin and then isolating them in a prolonged abusive relationship with leadership. In these circles of pretenders, often masquerading as clergy, leadership uses its leverage in the community to continue to pressure and encourage submission to their self-described authority to control demonic spirits. And those trapped within these spiritually abusive environments are taught that the only way out of them is to remain subjected to the purported expertise of these deliverers.

[00:28:49]Which finally brings us to the conclusion of this talk this morning and the introduction of a new psychometric designed to keep all of this context in mind and serve accurately the populace caught up in all of this mess. The deliverance ministry abuse scale or deemus for short. A very appropriate name given the fact that the character Deeus in the New Testament was rejected by the followers of Jesus Christ for coercively applying his apostolic privileges in order to amass wealth for himself through spiritual abuse.

[00:29:17]The Deus instrument was designed with an integrationist perspective weaving both a therapeutic and theological interest form of interpretation that undergurs a series of 15 normative principles found across the spectrum of both deliverance history ritual respect as well as details shared by the most modern of deliverance sessions desires. These statements arranged at random correlate to three known categories present in settings where course of control of the individual is at play. These categories are the subjugation of autonomy, psychological distress and malignancy level of the group suspected of coercion. Attached each statement was a liyker scale with responses indicating the intensity with which the individuals experienced the situations each statement reflected.

[00:30:03]Results from a sample of 30 participants indicate that the deliverance ministry abuse scale shows initial indications of high internal reliability and a mainly one factor solution following principal component analysis. Further indicating that the initial set of deeis items are reliable in this test sample. This provides evidence to support for wider usage and continued future testing of the instrument. Correlation testing demonstrated that deeis scores are significantly positively related to levels of spiritual harm, showing early indications of external reliability for the scale. Lack of support for predicted negative relationships between dema scores and well-being indicates that further work needs to examine in more detail the psychological complexity of the deliberance experience and its meaning to those involved. These findings imply the urgent need to reconsider the wider use of deliberants as a mental health intervention as well as seriously implies the prudence of formulating protocols for the protection of those being subjected to deliverance interventions through policy and accountability measures in both the secular and religious populations regularly suggesting deliverance as a mental health intervention. The implications for the study are vast and that it appears possible to potentially measure deliverance ministry abuse making the study not only beneficial for future researchers but also serving as research that is truly pioneering in reach. Although we cannot yet conclude that deeis is going to be the measure in this field, we have demonstrated that such abuses do appear to be able to be quantified. And not just that, that they appear to be quantifiable in the greater context of spiritual abuse, which implies a critical re-examination of previous research in both the field of theology as well as psychology that promotes deliverance approaches to spiritual, emotional, and psychological interventions in both secular and religious contexts. At the very least, this initial and successful pilot testing of the dema scale here indicates that deliverance ministry can be perceived as abusive by some who experience it and as predictive of wider aspects of spiritual abuse. The extremely precise wording and structure of Deeus to emit any type of judgmental undertone or assumptive negative connotations for the experience of deliverance appears to have been successful as the bilateral dist distribution of the well-being measures clearly reflects. This is helpful in that Deeus appears to have captured both a range of experiences with deliverance as would be expected given the broad spectrum with which deliverance is applied and experienced as a widely utilized mental health intervention.

[00:32:20]That being said, the fact that Deeus demonstrated the first hypothesis clearly that spiritual harm and abuse is a wider context for deliverance experienced demands further critical analysis of each of the types of deliverance and to what degree the harms and abuses are incurred therein. It is my hope that this talk this morning demonstrates the continued need for reconsideration regarding the regular use of deliverance ministries by both secular mental health providers and religious representatives under the overall assumption that such use is beneficial and not harmful in the lives of those being subjected to such interventions. Given this new instrument has been piloted amongst a population of deliverance ministry users and that data significantly correlates to an incidence of spiritual harm and abuse. These findings clearly indicate that the assumptions of a benefit for the greater populace must be urgently re-examined for the sake of the people in these communities. The willingness for a population that is seeking alternative mental health care interventions and deliverance ministries to even participate in a study run by a researcher who falls into the category of clinical mental health care. a provision in a category that is normally deeply suspicious and untrusted by deliverance communities optimistically implies that the gap between those two worlds is closing and not widening. This means that this study also provides the profoundly encouraging conclusion that such suspicions are being alleviated through education, respect for ritual and concerted demonstrations of understanding by members of the field of psychology of course control for continued communication and aid to those suffering in potentially spiritually harmful environments. This bridge between the differing iterations of spiritual medicine, both theologically and clinically, is quintessential and implies that the intensely hopeful goal of the brotherhood of man being achieved in this particular subset of human existence could be a genuine reality in the immediate future through measures that continue to communicate a desire for authentic healing, such as the deus scale introduced this morning. With that happy note, I consider it a great privilege to open this up to you for any questions you might