Dear Liam,
You ask some important questions and I would like to address them properly, so please bear with me. Let me start with an illustrative personal account. 2 1/2 years ago my 20-year old daughter suffered a stroke in the left frontal cortex. She was initially treated at Penn State Hershey and did her in-patient rehab there. She the went to MGH for out-patient neurology and Spaulding Rehab. The neurologist at MGH shared the 4 CT’s and 7 MRI’s with her network of 32 colleagues. 16 diagnosed arterial thrombosis and 16 venous thrombosis. 1 1/2 years later, after follow up visits to MGH and additional visits to comprehensive medical facilities, no one had a diagnosis for her chronic fatigue, dizziness and headaches. (How can you have a headache when you are taking 325 mg of aspirin everyday?)
We finally took her to functional neurologist. Dr. Schmoe had reviewed all her scans and her history prior to our visit. He personally performed every exam during her stay. After two hours, this is what he told us. She is suffering from dysautonomia irritated by damage to her basal ganglia. Her fatigue is from POTS, with a resting, standing heart rate of 140 bpm and headaches caused unregulated, rapid eye movements (forcing the neck muscles to constantly compensate). Dr. Schmoe took no scans, did no blood work, and prescribed no drugs. All he did was what Hippocrates prescribed - listen to your patient, don’t see more than six per day, and do no harm. In ten hours of office visits with therapy, she was a changed person.
I use this concrete example to demonstrate the complexities that exist in our world of specialized medicine, in a purely neurological case. When you add the spiritual variable, it can seem overwhelming in modern medicine. Dr. Edith Fiore understood the overwhelming obstacles and wrote a challenge in her book to modern medicine - she said: “We (psychiatrists) are the only doctors who spend time with our patients and we need to use that time to discover the underlying cause of (mental) illness.”
From Dr. Fiore’s work, I will give one relatively simple explore example of how lost souls can cause mental illness. She speak of a patient suffering from schizophrenic symptoms who has lost her twin sister in an auto accident a number of years ago. As the patient recalled the death of her sister, Fiore found an important clue. As her sister was dying, the patient had prayed, “Dear God, I will do anything to help my sister.”
The the sister died, she had an open invitation to stay with her sister who had promised to do anything for her. Instead of “going into the light”, she stayed with her sister, exerting her will on the patient’s life which grew stronger over time. This made the patient indecisive at times and doing things she would normally not have done when her sister’s will was strong. Once Fiore realized the invitation that her patient had offered, it was straight forward to remind the invitation and ask God to take this lost soul to Him.
Doing no harm, in my opinion, would be first eliminate the environmental variables from the patient’s life, including the spiritual ones, before suspecting a chemical imbalance in the brain and administering a pharmaceutical regiment with known potential side effects.
Thanks for listening!
, an apparent oxymoron 
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