One of the most intriguing questions I’ve encountered in my psychiatric chaplaincy practice is whether I can exorcise a patient. Between Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute in San Francisco and Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Boston, I’ve worked with some 30 psychiatric inpatients who approached me with concerns about possession by the devil, demons, or evil spirits. In perhaps 15 of those cases, a psychiatric inpatient specifically asked me to perform an exorcism upon them. The question has been quite simple: it is not whether there is any such thing as exorcism, or whether it is efficacious, but simply whether the chaplain will perform one.
Read full article in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin here: https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/chaplain-can-you-do-an-exorcism/
Rabbi Jeremy Sher 
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