"I am infinitely glad," said Dmitry, "that I have seen Fr. Arseny again; In my life I met with many priests, revered them, tried to follow their advice and instructions, but yesterday and today I received more than I received then. I began to tell Fr. Arseny about my domestic difficulties, about the current situation at work, mentioned several names of people who did not understand me; Fr. Arseny crossed himself, stopped and began to speak quietly. He entered my inner self, my spiritual world, and read the layers that had accumulated in me over the years. I listened and saw myself, saw the abyss of mistakes made, uncorrected and permeated my whole being. He spoke about people with whom he did not get along, called their names, showed their view of the situation, spoke on behalf of these people, as if he knew them.

"Why is it difficult for all of you? Each sees only himself and does not want to take the position of the other for a single moment." He was right about everything; After a long cleansing conversation and confession, the heaviest burden of my worries was lifted, I understood what I had to do, and I returned home a different person.

You must understand," Mitya said, "one might have thought that his conversation with me was the conversation of an experienced psychologist-analyst, perhaps a psychiatrist with vast experience.

Of course, Fr. Arseny was not an experienced psychologist, psychoanalyst, psychiatrist – he simply had an all-encompassing love for man, combined with love for God, a great spiritual experience and a gift given by the Lord to penetrate into the human soul with a clairvoyant eye. I, a professor, a doctor of medicine, a psychiatrist who had received thousands of sick and healthy people, with vast experience, who had written dozens of scientific papers on psychiatry, was before him as a student who was just beginning to study a given course. If I, a psychiatrist, knew the psyche and spiritual world of a patient like Fr. Arseny, then I think most of my patients would have recovered long ago. But in order to become a person like Fr. Arseny, one needs constant prayer directed to God, and an all-consuming love for man; the union of these two principles creates an ascetic, a man of prayer, an elder."

Twice more we came with Dmitry to Fr. Arseny, and later he came without me. On my second visit, an extremely interesting conversation took place, which I recorded on my return to Moscow.

We arrived, there were already several people from Moscow, Voronezh and Vladimir in the house. We sat in the dining-room in the evening; Antonina Sergeevna, knowing that Dmitry Evgenievich was a psychiatrist, asked the question: "Tell me, did the Lord heal the possessed, were they mentally ill?"

Dmitry answered: "A person can suffer from mental illness, but he can suffer from a spiritual illness, these are completely different diseases. People who are sick with spiritual illnesses are possessed; They are obsessed with a thirst for murder, an irresistible desire to do evil, to torture, to torture, to insult, their entire spiritual essence is saturated with evil, they can worship evil – demonic forces. Remember the two demoniac who lived in the tombs (Matt. 8:23), their possession. Remember the NKVD investigators who conducted interrogations with the use of horrific tortures, abuse of interrogators, their mockery of women that surpassed their understanding of humanity. These investigators were seriously spiritually ill, the forces of evil – demonism seized their souls, but many of them did not suffer from mental illness at all, I have met such spiritually seriously ill people more than once. Psychiatry cannot treat these people, it is an obsession.

Deliverance from spiritual illness can be accomplished by God's mercy only by a spiritual ascetic, completely immersed in prayer, love for God, for people, and not every pastor can cure such a sick person, which is confirmed by the words of our Lord Jesus Christ: "This kind cannot come out except from prayer and fasting." (Mark 9:29).

Mental illnesses can be treated in psychiatric hospitals and at home with medications, physiotherapy, labor, and psychoanalysis.

It happens that a person is simultaneously sick with spiritual and mental illness. It is extremely difficult to treat such patients, in my practice there have been no cures. In addition, seeing a spiritual illness, a modern doctor will not distinguish it from a mental illness, and if he does, he cannot say: "Go to the priest." It is necessary to note something else: a person who suffers from a spiritual illness – demonism – will never want to be healed by a priest.

Those who were mentally ill at certain moments in their lives created works of genius (Vrubel, Garshin, etc.) or, coming to the Church, became deeply religious people, recovered, they were helped by spiritual guidance, prayer and the Orthodox spirit of the Church itself. At various times, the spiritual leaders of many communities sent their spiritual children to me for consultation or treatment, and many of them later became wonderful priests, monks, nuns, and artists. Illness was overcome by faith in God."

The question was asked: do healthy people exist at all? Dmitry answered: "Strange question. Of course, there are, and most of them, but many have their own peculiarities, maybe even oddities; These are not mental illnesses. Sometimes these are slight shifts in the psyche, which can be called "mental runny noses", caused by strong tension, shocks, disorders. They can turn into serious mental illness if the necessary measures are not taken in advance. Some oddities of a person are the result of upbringing, the influence of the environment, a difficult childhood, harmful communication with bad people. The influence of faith and the Church is especially fruitful for such people, they get rid of their insignificant ailment or oddities, in advanced cases psychoanalysis helps, quickly relieving the patient of these frivolous, but restless habits, oddities, bad character traits."

"I agree with many things," said Fr. Arseny, "but I will add to what you have said: spiritual illness, unlike mental illness, is terrible in that under the influence of dark forces it is contagious and spreads with the speed of an epidemic. Take our "leaders" in the past, they were seriously spiritually ill, dark forces completely took possession of their souls, evil filled their whole being, and they infected the souls of millions of people with it, and the result was the creation of the Gulag. The famous aphorism expressing the rule of evil: "Here the power is not Soviet, but Solovetsky" symbolizes the millions of tortured in the camps, shot, starved, frozen, and all these unfortunates went through brutal torture and humiliation. The destruction of churches, the mass extermination of bishops, priests, deacons, and believers could occur only because the "microbe" of dark malice was thrown by the "leaders" into the human mass.

Their faith in demonic Evil had no boundaries, millions of people infected with evil supported the "cult of personality", participated in repressions, denunciations, created the Gulag and worked in it, not understanding in the name of what they inflicted torture, killed people. Or rather, they understood: it is necessary to denounce, kill, torture, this is what the supreme Evil demands, which means that it is necessary and useful; and only when they themselves were interrogated and tortured in the Gulag did they see the light, beginning to "recover", but not all of them.