Journal of Scientiﬁc Exploration Anomalistics and Frontier Science 124 JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION • VOL. 39, NO 1 – SPRING 2025 journalofscientiﬁcexploration.org Spirit possession refers to a supernatural force taking control of the human body. It is recog- nized [sic] across many cultures and is a phe- nomenon incorporated into various religious beliefs. (Pouchly, 2012, p. 67) Possession experiences are most commonly known through cultural and religious traditions. More kept under wraps, however, is the reference to possession made by the medical ﬁeld of psychiatry. Possession appears in the category of dissociative disorders that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5-TR) of the American Psychiatric Association (2022) deﬁnes as “characterized by a disrup- HIGHLIGHTS Psychiatry’s traditional treatment of possession-like experiences, particularly through diagnoses like dissociative identity disorder, reproduces a colonial framework that fails to consider cultural and spiritual perspectives, whereas a more indigenous and animis- tic approach more fully accounts for the complexity of these experiences. ABSTRACT e experience of being possessed by an invisible and outside spirit seems archaic and outdated to many people today. However, the scientiﬁc and medical ﬁeld of psychiatry contains diagnoses that classify this experience as a form of psychopathology, most no- tably Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Moreover, indigenous peoples and research- ers have detailed many accounts of how the experience of possession makes sense within their cultural and local backdrop. In this essay, we employ the strategy of decol- onization to demonstrate how psychiatry continues to exert colonial power to manage cases of possession. In so doing, we argue that psychiatry lacks a robust phenomeno- logical and culturally sensitive understanding of spirituality. We also put forward an animistic framework more congruent with the possession experience by examining the inﬂuence of invisible worlds. KEYWORDS Decolonization, exceptional experiences, mental health, possession, psychiatry. ESSAY Jacob W. Glazier 1 jglazier@westga.edu orcid.org/0000-0002-1036-4022 Taylor N. Robinson 1 trobin17@my.westga.edu 1 School of Social Sciences of the University of West Georgia SUBMITTED November 30, 2023 ACCEPTED April 29, 2024 PUBLISHED March 30, 2025 https://doi.org/10.31275/20253275 PLATINUM OPEN ACCESS Creative Commons License 4.0. CC-BY-NC. Attribution required. No commercial use. Decolonizing Possession: A Blueprint to Invisible Worlds tion of and/or discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control, and behavior” (p. 330). Most explicitly, as we later articulate, the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) captures the symp- toms or features most closely associated with spiritual and religious notions of possession. Letting the genie out of the bottle, we argue that possession experiences are not necessarily psychiatric. In fact, the power exerted through the medical and scien- tiﬁc discipline of psychiatry colonizes these experiences, making them more amenable to these very models. As such, in what follows, we use the strategy of decoloniza- tion (Smith et al., 2019), arising out of post-colonial stud-