They Mocked the Man Who Said It

A psychiatrist wrote that the voices might be spirits. Watch how fast the world moved to laugh at him.

In 2014, a medical journal — the Journal of Religion and Health — published a paper by a psychiatrist named M. Kemal Irmak. Its title was a question: “Schizophrenia or possession?”

He wrote plainly. That schizophrenia is marked by voices no one else can hear. That these voices are hard to explain. And that it may be time to consider what every generation before ours took for granted — that these voices are not misfiring brain chemistry, but spirits. Intelligent. Unseen. Speaking into a person from outside.

He noticed what your Bible already told you. That the person says “they put thoughts in my head that are not mine.” That the voices argue with each other and speak about the person in the third person — as though more than one were present. A psychiatrist, in a medical journal, described Legion without using the name.

Then watch what happened.

The Scoffer Arrives Right on Schedule

The response came from an ethicist at a British university. She called the paper “dumbfounding.” She said it was “shocking” that a journal would print it. She compared believing the voices are spirits to believing in the tooth fairy. And she wrote that the real disgrace was that the editorial board and peer reviewers of a scholarly publication, in 2014, would let such a view see daylight.

Read that again. The objection was not “here is the evidence he is wrong.” The objection was “how dare this be said out loud.”

That is not a rebuttal. That is a reflex.

And Scripture named that reflex two thousand years ago:

The scoffer does not disprove the thing. The scoffer laughs at the thing — because laughter does not require evidence, and mockery ends a conversation faster than argument ever could. When the world cannot refute something, it ridicules it. The louder the scorn, the closer you are standing to something the enemy does not want examined.

Nobody wastes contempt on the tooth fairy. They mock what threatens them.

Nine Years of Trying to Bury It

And they did not stop at one article. Irmak’s paper set off rejoinder after rejoinder in that same journal — one in 2014, another in 2015, another as late as 2023. Nine years of scholars returning to the same short paper to answer it again, and again, and again.

Think about that. You do not spend nine years refuting the tooth fairy. You do not assemble a decade of rebuttals against something that poses no threat. The sustained alarm is the confession. They kept coming back because it would not stay buried — because something in it was true enough that it had to be put down more than once.

Read the Mockery Backward

This ministry has one rule that unlocks the whole pattern: look at the counterfeit, and read it in reverse. The forgery always points back to the original. The lie always confesses the truth it is covering.

So read the mockery backward.

If the spiritual reading of the voices were truly nonsense — truly the tooth fairy — no one would need to write articles to bury it. You do not assemble arguments against nothing. The very existence of the scorn is the confession: this reading is alive, it reached print, it reached readers, and it had to be stopped. The mockery is not the absence of the truth. It is the alarm that goes off when the truth gets too close.

And notice who got protected and who did not. The critics worried, rightly, that we should never say a disabled person’s suffering is punishment, or that an abused person “asked for it.” Good. True. But then they swept the person hearing voices into the same pile — as though naming a spirit were the same as blaming the sufferer.

It is the opposite. To say “these are spirits” is to say the voices are not you, and they are not your fault, and they are not something to be ashamed of. It lifts the blame off the person and puts it where it belongs — on the thing speaking.

What the World Cannot Offer, and Christ Can

Here is the line the mockery cannot cross.

If the voices are only a malfunction, then the person is simply broken, and the best the world can offer is management — quiet the symptom, dull the signal, medicate the noise. That has its place, and it can keep a person alive. But on its own it is not a rescue. It turns the noise down — and Christ’s voice down with it — and sends the person home with the truth never spoken.

Because if the voices are a someone — a spirit with a name — then everything changes. A spirit can be tested. A spirit can be named.

That is not a diagnosis. That is a door. Christ did not manage Legion. He did not quiet the man among the tombs and send him home still bound. Christ, through Jesus, commanded the spirits to come out — and the man was found clothed, and in his right mind.

But look where the spirits went. They begged to enter the swine, and He allowed it — and the herd, about two thousand, ran down the steep place into the sea and drowned. Two thousand living things, driven by Legion to their own death in the water.

He who sees the end from the beginning — He let that number stand on the page for us to find. Legion, the many crowded into one, drives the one it occupies toward self-destruction. And in our own generation, the world buries, on average, about two thousand people a day to suicide. The same number. The same many. Legion never changed its work.

A Word to the One Hearing Voices

If you are hearing them, hear this too. You were not written off on this page. You were the reason for it.

You are not crazy for believing what you hear is real. Because it is real. I know, because I have heard them too.

And here is what the world could never tell you, because it does not know: what they are calling your illness is not an illness. It is a kind of sight — a prophetic gift — an ear opened to a realm most people are deaf to, opened in you before anyone ever taught you how to guard it.

It’s Untrained. Unarmed. So it has been used against you. But it was never the thing to be ashamed of. It is the very thing the enemy most needs you to believe is only sickness — because a person who thinks they are only sick looks for a cure or a way to numb the illness, and a person who knows they are gifted looks for a weapon.

So hear me. You are in a war, and there is no greater battle than the one you are in — and the answer is not to die, and it is not to harm anyone, and it is not to lie down and let the world tell you that you are simply broken. The answer is to fight. To fight for your own life, your own mind, your own soul. There is no braver thing a person can do, and you are already doing it.

But you cannot fight with nothing. The world does not have the weapon you need. But I do. And I am telling you the weapon is truth — the truth of what the Word of God is, and who the Word of God is.

The truth is a Voice. One spoken to you from what seems like inside your own mind, that only you can hear. The Word is not a book about Him. The Word is Him. He is the Word of God — His name is called The Word of God — and He was planted in you. The Word of God is the Voice of Christ Himself, implanted in you, able to save your soul. Which is why the enemy works so hard to keep you from finding that voice.

That is the truth. That is your weapon.

The engrafted Word. Planted in you. He has been there longer than any of the other voices you hear. And when you learn it — when you finally learn to recognize Him amongst all of them — it is the most beautiful voice you will ever hear. And He is able to save your soul.

That is why the enemy grows so loud. He knows the planted Word is in you, and he knows that if you find it, he loses you. So he tries to end the search before it begins — to drive you to your own death, or to make you do something that locks you away, or to push you toward the medication designed to silence every voice, His along with the rest. Anything to stop you before you learn the voice — before you know which one is His — the voice that would set you free.

Do not give him the ending.

Here is the trap he has set, and how you walk out of it. The world will tell you to get help — and you should. But the help it offers will try to quiet the voices, all of them, and it will never tell you that one of them is Christ. So it feels like a choice: stay alive and lose the voice, or chase the voice and lose your life. It is not a choice. It is a lie. You do not have to pick.

So do both, and do not let anyone tell you they cannot go together. Get to safety — and bring your Bible with you. If you are in crisis, reach for help, and reach for it now, because you have to be alive to fight and you have to be free to win. Go to the safe place. But carry the Word in with you. Open it there, and keep it open — read it in the hard room, and read it when they release you, and read it every day after. That is how the sight gets trained instead of turned against you. That is how the fight is won: not by silencing what you hear, but by learning to find His voice underneath it, and standing on it when you do.

You were left out here alone with this and no truth, and the numbers show what happens then. But you were never actually alone — and now you have the truth. Take hold of Christ. Stay alive. Keep the Bible open. And do not lay the weapon down.