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Also known as spirit releasement. Depossession is practised all over the world and is the exorcism of human and non-human spirits, such as elemental spirits and demons thought to be attached to an individual and causing physical, mental and emotional distress.

American psychologist Edith Fiore used depossession in her past-life therapy, believing that in regressing patients to past lives interference from attached spirits could be observed. According to Fiore, amongst about 70,000 cases 70 per cent were unaware that they were showing signs of spirit attachment, such as mood swings, chronic pains, illnesses and addictions.

Most spirits are thought to be those of humans who have died but not left the earthly plane. They are believed to attach themselves to humans during moments of poor health and emotional weakness. Depossession is typically accomplished by persuading the spirits that they need to leave, and patients subsequently say they feel much better afterwards. Depossession was common practice at the height of the popularity of spiritualism, but the first medically trained person to approach mental illness as caused by spirit possession was the American physician and psychologist Carl Wickland.

Wickland and his wife, Anna, a medium, attributed all sorts of mental illness to confused spirits trapped in the auras of living people. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Wicklands depos-sessed a large number of their patients. They used a static electricity machine that transmitted low voltage electric shocks to the patient, causing the possessing spirit distress and forcing it into Anna’s body and then to leave. If the spirit resisted, Wickland called on spirit helpers to keep the spirit in a ‘dungeon’, out of the aura of Anna or the victim, until it stopped its selfish quest and departed.