:Complicating the issue are two different situations:
:*on the one hand, those cases of desperate attention-getters who subconsciously seek to imitate the known actions of persons demonically possessed, who are gravely disappointed or even angrily outraged when told after careful discernment that they are not really possessed and do not need an exorcism performed but do need counselling and/or medical treatment,<br>together with those cases of other individuals who, if they have never behaved this way before, decide to attend a prayer meeting, or a gathering focused on "deliverance ministry" featuring exorcism for unhappy sufferers of various ills, and being influenced by what they hear and see seize the opportunity to relieve their intolerably drab, anonymous, obscure and seemingly inconsequential existence by imitatively manifesting in the midst of a public gathering signs of apparent demonic possession in order to be the intense focus of a dramatic public exorcism, who are not in fact possessed, but who have suddenly convinced themselves that they too must be possessed, who '''might''' or '''might ''not''''' be [[Mental illness|mentally ill]], and
:*on the other hand, those carefully documented cases which have repeatedly and conclusively demonstrated the fact that many persons who actually do harbor evil spirits are usually unaware of it before conclusive evidence of their presence is discovered, and some cases demonstrate the reality that the evil spirit inhabiting the victim does not always manifest symptoms of illness, or other cases in which the unclean spirit does not seize complete control of the victim's body causing a complete loss of conscious awareness, but can take involuntary control of parts of the victim's body against their will—for example, partial paralysis of limbs, intermittent episodes of partial blindness or complete and permanent blindness, deafness, speech impairment, rashes, peculiar skin eruptions, boils, fevers, chills, involuntary spasmodic movements, unexplainable disabilities resulting in unemployment or inability to care for oneself, "blackouts", amnesia, all without any apparent physiological origin or ordinarily diagnosable observable pathology according to nature. Job 2:7; Exodus 12:23; Luke 13:11 and 16; 1 Timothy 1:20 and 1 Corinthians 5:5; 10:10; Mark 1:26; 3:10-11; 5:2-5 and 8; Mark 9:20-27; Matthew 12:43; Acts 16:16; Acts 19:16; Luke 6:18; 7:21—compare the experience of Saul king of Israel, 1 Samuel 16:14-16 and 23; 18:10-11; 28:3-13; also Saul's behavior 1 Samuel 18:6-29; 19:9-15; 22:11-19; 24:16-17.