I witnessed something very similar to what this article describes in my mother when I was only 14.
It was absolutely horrifying, being a 14-year-old kid in Texas with Bible-thumping white-trash parents, and seeing this. I now understand it to be mental illness and I can point to many health-related commonalities that underlie thousands of such cases, but as a 14-year-old kid? Shit, I was terrified.
Unusual voices? Check. "Come to kill her"? Check. Odd facial expressions and totally different demeanor? Check. Exorcism? Check.
It was so bad I still, now in my 30's, have nightmares about it from time to time. I'll probably have one tonight after drumming all this up, but screw it - people need to know the damage this kind of stuff can cause kids, families and of course those who suffer.
It went for about 3 days. Early February, 1997. It was a 3-day school weekend for some reason and I was to go back to school the next day. I lied awake in my bed trying to fall asleep when I heard screams coming from the living room. "Eh, mom will be fine," I thought, "Dad's in there with her. They're watching TBN." (TBN = "Trinity Broadcasting Network", a religious TV network, Bible-thumping 24/7.)
My dad was the stereotype of a cowboy living in modern times. You know the voice of Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2? It shook me pretty hard because he sounds exactly like my dad did. Same accent, looked the same given the mustache, and even had a nearly identical voice. He was the kind of guy, just like that character, that if he was MISSING A LIMB, blood spurting all over the place, he'd shrug it off and go about his business.
So hearing that fear in his voice was almost as frightening as what followed.
The screams kept coming. After a while I got out of bed to see what was going on. I found my mother sitting in a chair shaking violently and screaming bloody murder. "Dad, what the hell is this?!" I asked. With a fear and desperation I'd never seen before, and never again even in death just last year, he said, "PRAY."
"But Dad," I went on, "what-"
He smacked me up-side the head. Not to hurt me, but to get my attention. "PRAY!" he said, louder and with greater fear this time.
I began to do what I was taught - pray in tongues. After a couple hours of this, she seemed OK, and my dad immediately started looking for "doorways". We gathered up all the VHS tapes we rented from Blockbuster and my mom and dad went to take them back - early. I went back to bed thinking "well that was weird."
By the time they made it back, she was shaking again. Screaming, too. I heard them come back in and my dad told me to start praying again. After a few minutes, he left the room to make a phone call. He'd called a friend of the family with the same beliefs and woke them and their two kids up to take my mother to their house for prayer.
On the way over, in the car, "the demon" began to speak. NEVER had I heard such force and volume in a human voice as when my dad told it/her, "SHUT UP!". The windows in the car shook from the sound waves. "It" complied.
We got to our family-friend's house, a much nicer suburban home than our crappy little apartment. My dad's friend and his wife, along with their two kids and me, prayed over my mother for hours. Thankfully some one was thinking about the kids, and the eldest of us, Amber, who was in high school with a paper route conscripted myself and her younger brother, my friend who committed suicide only two years later, to help. That got my mind off it for a little while and when we got back from delivering newspapers, my parents and I left and went home.
Things seemed calm until sunrise, roughly, when the behavior started again. As I prayed over my mother to keep her calm and from hurting herself or us, my dad stepped away to call the school and tell them I'd be "out sick". I mean, good luck explaining what was really going on, amirite?
Not being Catholic, my dad next called a local Christian TV station that only broadcast in the west Texas area, and asked to speak with one of the preachers that had a regularly aired program. Later that day, that preacher and his wife showed up to conduct an ad-hoc exorcism over my mother. It wasn't inscribed in ritual like the Catholic church version mentioned in the article, but featured a lot of the same ideas like getting rid of "doorways" and commanding the demon "in the name of Jesus".
The part that scared me the most was when I was in the living room with everyone praying over my mother. Ever since I was a very young kid, I always had this ULTIMATE fear of my mother dying. It was literally the worst thing I could imagine; it gave me frequent nightmares and when I was younger than at this point in time, she couldn't leave the house because I was so afraid she'd never come back.
Well, there I was with four adults in the living room of our tiny apartment participating in an exorcism over my mother. The preacher commanded the demon to tell us why it was there.
> "I have come to KILL HER!" "it" said violently in a deep voice.
I don't remember what happened next; I think I yelled at it with equal violence. But the next part I remember scared me just as much.
I had been dismissed to my room and told "you can watch TBN on your TV - no video games, no books, NOTHING ELSE." So I went to room and turned on the TV. I was so bored and frankly freaking out over the religious stuff that I channel surfed and found a basketball game. "Eh this can't hurt anything," I thought, so I watched it.
While the San Antonio Spurs were sinking baskets, more "demonic talk" and "pleading the blood of Jesus" stuff was going on less than 3 feet behind me, through the wall.
Then the preacher commanded the demon: "I the name of Jesus, you will TELL ME YOUR NAME."
I quickly put my hands over my ears and made a little noise to drown out the ambient volume. I was so frightened I didn't want to know.
Overall bizarre behavior went on for 3 days straight. By the end, I myself was having auditory hallucinations. My dad told me this was "insight into the sprit realm" and a sign that "we were winning." In hindsight, that's a much better explanation to give a 14-year-old than "you're going fucking crazy," which was what was really happening.
Now, nearly 22 years removed from this and having renounced religion all together, I recognize this for what it was: dissociative identity disorder brought on by a combination of menopause and extreme stress.
You see my mother's father had died just six months before this happened. She was going through menopause, and although they tried to hide it, my parents marriage was going through some serious trouble while we didn't have enough money to make ends meet. I later learned that she'd also been having extremely graphic, horrifying dreams where she was watching her husband (my dad) and me both being crucified simultaneously AND having our skin flayed off our bodies. Very graphic stuff.
When deeply immersed in religious dogma as we were in our home (thanks to my dad), all these things combined to make my mother somehow "snap". Her mind created an alternative personality that thought it was a "demon" because of all the religious stuff she'd been subjected to, including notions of demonic possession, the "power of Christ", the mythological story of post-crucifixion conquering of hell (what Jesus supposedly did for 3 days after he died before rising again), all that. My parents were hardcore into what the non-denominational Christians often call "spiritual warfare".
All these factors combined, it's easy to see how a person could lose it and how something like this could manifest.
I also want to point something else out. From what I've seen (although it's hard to get real/good stats), most demonic possession victims ("patients"?) appear to be female. In my mother's case, she was going through menopause. In this article, the main subject had incidents after major health issues - a C-section, a bout with e-coli, a second birth. I wonder if hormonal imbalance could somehow make a person more susceptible to triggers?
And speaking of triggers, did you notice how in this article they use things like crucifixes, holy water, reciting prayers, etc. "judge" if the person may be possessed? Well, if it's psychological in nature, putting these triggers in front of somebody is just going to make the situation WORSE!
Finally, I hate to say this, but the use of exorcism rituals may actually be the only immediate (in the moment, non-chemical) treatment for a while until we figure out what's going on here, because they play into the same psychology that causes the problem. Anyone who believes they are possessed by an evil demon almost always also believes in the power of a good "god" over said evil. Performing exorcisms (or allowing them to be performed), while not a treatment or cure, can help via psychosomatic effect.