Science Speculates: Schizophrenia Still Very Confusing: Hm, Demons, Maybe? Can You Prove It Isn't True?

Real Clear Science reports from the field of schizophrenia research and speculation (which, if you've dug into it, you'll maybe understand why this sort of explanation seems as valid as many others):

IS SCHIZOPHRENIA CAUSED by demons? A Turkish researcher seems to think so, and his article on the topic was just published in the Journal of Religion and Health, a scientific journal owned by Springer, a German-based publishing company.

The first two-thirds of M. Kemal Irmak's paper, "Schizophrenia or Possession?", read normally enough….And then you arrive at this little doozy:

"One approach to this hallucination problem is to consider the possibility of a demonic world."

…..You're first treated to a background on all things demonic (boldness added to emphasize the absurdity):

In our region, demons are believed to be intelligent and unseen creatures that occupy a parallel world to that of mankind. In many aspects of their world, they are very similar to us. They marry, have children, and die. The life span, however, is far greater than ours (Ashour 1989). Through their powers of flying and invisibility, they are the chief component in occult activities. The ability to possess and take over the minds and bodies of humans is also a power which the demons have utilized greatly over the centuries (Littlewood 2004; Gadit and Callanan 2006; Ally and Laher 2008). Most scholars accept that demons can possess people and can take up physical space within a human's body (Asch 1985). They possess people for many reasons. Sometimes it is because they have been hurt accidentally, but possession may also occur because of love (Ashour 1989; Philips 1997). When the demon enters the human body, they settle in the control center of the body–brain.

Once the groundwork for demons is laid, Irmak expounds on the link between schizophrenia and possession:

There exist similarities between the clinical symptoms of schizophrenia and demonic possession. Common symptoms in schizophrenia and demonic possession such as hallucinations and delusions may be a result of the fact that demons in the vicinity of the brain may form the symptoms of schizophrenia… 

Those similarities do exist! Real Clear Science asked the editor of the journal about this curious article; Dr. Curtis Hart responded, "The article was published in hopes that it would provoke discussion," he said. "The Journal does not agree that demons are a real entity."

The same publisher, Springer, as Real Clear Science points out, "recently made headlines by withdrawing 16 gibberish papers spotted by an independent computer scientist. The nonsense papers were created with a computer program, SciGen."

I wrote on how the science of mental illness isn't quite advanced enough to be of much use in court back in 2007, in "You Can't See Why on an fMRI."