The Shamanic View of Mental Illness

The Shamanic View of Mental Illness

by Stephanie Marohn (featuring Malidoma Patrice Somé)
(Excerpted from The Natural Medicine Guide to Schizophrenia,
pages 178-189, or The Natural Medicine Guide to Bi-polar Disorder)


What a Shaman Sees in A Mental Hospital

In the shamanic view, mental illness signals “the birth of a healer,” explains Malidoma Patrice Somé. Thus, mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, spiritual crises, and need to be regarded as such to aid the healer in being born.

What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm. “Mental disorder, behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field,” says Dr. Somé. These disturbances result when the person does not get assistance in dealing with the presence of the energy from the spirit realm.

One of the things Dr. Somé encountered when he first came to the United States in 1980 for graduate study was how this country deals with mental illness. When a fellow student was sent to a mental institute due to “nervous depression,” Dr. Somé went to visit him.

“I was so shocked. That was the first time I was brought face to face with what is done here to people exhibiting the same symptoms I’ve seen in my village.” What struck Dr. Somé was that the attention given to such symptoms was based on pathology, on the idea that the condition is something that needs to stop. This was in complete opposition to the way his culture views such a situation. As he looked around the stark ward at the patients, some in straitjackets, some zoned out on medications, others screaming, he observed to himself, “So this is how the healers who are attempting to be born are treated in this culture. What a loss! What a loss that a person who is finally being aligned with a power from the other world is just being wasted.”

Another way to say this, which may make more sense to the Western mind, is that we in the West are not trained in how to deal or even taught to acknowledge the existence of psychic phenomena, the spiritual world. In fact, psychic abilities are denigrated. When energies from the spiritual world emerge in a Western psyche, that individual is completely unequipped to integrate them or even recognize what is happening. The result can be terrifying. Without the proper context for and assistance in dealing with the breakthrough from another level of reality, for all practical purposes, the person is insane. Heavy dosing with anti-psychotic drugs compounds the problem and prevents the integration that could lead to soul development and growth in the individual who has received these energies.

On the mental ward, Dr Somé saw a lot of “beings” hanging around the patients, “entities” that are invisible to most people but that shamans and psychics are able to see. “They were causing the crisis in these people,” he says. It appeared to him that these beings were trying to get the medications and their effects out of the bodies of the people the beings were trying to merge with, and were increasing the patients’ pain in the process. “The beings were acting almost like some kind of excavator in the energy field of people. They were really fierce about that. The people they were doing that to were just screaming and yelling,” he said. He couldn’t stay in that environment and had to leave.

In the Dagara tradition, the community helps the person reconcile the energies of both worlds–”the world of the spirit that he or she is merged with, and the village and community.” That person is able then to serve as a bridge between the worlds and help the living with information and healing they need. Thus, the spiritual crisis ends with the birth of another healer. “The other world’s relationship with our world is one of sponsorship,” Dr. Somé explains. “More often than not, the knowledge and skills that arise from this kind of merger are a knowledge or a skill that is provided directly from the other world.”

The beings who were increasing the pain of the inmates on the mental hospital ward were actually attempting to merge with the inmates in order to get messages through to this world. The people they had chosen to merge with were getting no assistance in learning how to be a bridge between the worlds and the beings’ attempts to merge were thwarted. The result was the sustaining of the initial disorder of energy and the aborting of the birth of a healer.

“The Western culture has consistently ignored the birth of the healer,” states Dr. Somé. “Consequently, there will be a tendency from the other world to keep trying as many people as possible in an attempt to get somebody’s attention. They have to try harder.” The spirits are drawn to people whose senses have not been anesthetized. “The sensitivity is pretty much read as an invitation to come in,” he notes.

Those who develop so-called mental disorders are those who are sensitive, which is viewed in Western culture as oversensitivity. Indigenous cultures don’t see it that way and, as a result, sensitive people don’t experience themselves as overly sensitive. In the West, “it is the overload of the culture they’re in that is just wrecking them,” observes Dr. Somé. The frenetic pace, the bombardment of the senses, and the violent energy that characterize Western culture can overwhelm sensitive people.

Schizophrenia and Foreign Energy

With schizophrenia, there is a special “receptivity to a flow of images and information, which cannot be controlled,” stated Dr. Somé. “When this kind of rush occurs at a time that is not personally chosen, and particularly when it comes with images that are scary and contradictory, the person goes into a frenzy.”

What is required in this situation is first to separate the person’s energy from the extraneous foreign energies, by using shamanic practice (what is known as a “sweep”) to clear the latter out of the individual’s aura. With the clearing of their energy field, the person no longer picks up a flood of information and so no longer has a reason to be scared and disturbed, explains Dr. Somé.

Then it is possible to help the person align with the energy of the spirit being attempting to come through from the other world and give birth to the healer. The blockage of that emergence is what creates problems. “The energy of the healer is a high-voltage energy,” he observes. “When it is blocked, it just burns up the person. It’s like a short-circuit. Fuses are blowing. This is why it can be really scary, and I understand why this culture prefers to confine these people. Here they are yelling and screaming, and they’re put into a straitjacket. That’s a sad image.” Again, the shamanic approach is to work on aligning the energies so there is no blockage, “fuses” aren’t blowing, and the person can become the healer they are meant to be.

It needs to be noted at this point, however, that not all of the spirit beings that enter a person’s energetic field are there for the purposes of promoting healing. There are negative energies as well, which are undesirable presences in the aura. In those cases, the shamanic approach is to remove them from the aura, rather than work to align the discordant energies.

Alex: Crazy in the USA, Healer in Africa

To test his belief that the shamanic view of mental illness holds true in the Western world as well as in indigenous cultures, Dr. Somé took a mental patient back to Africa with him, to his village. “I was prompted by my own curiosity to find out whether there’s truth in the universality that mental illness could be connected with an alignment with a being from another world,” says Dr. Somé.

Alex was an 18-year-old American who had suffered a psychotic break when he was 14. He had hallucinations, was suicidal, and went through cycles of dangerously severe depression. He was in a mental hospital and had been given a lot of drugs, but nothing was helping. “The parents had done everything–unsuccessfully,” says Dr. Somé. “They didn’t know what else to do.”

With their permission, Dr. Somé took their son to Africa. “After eight months there, Alex had become quite normal, Dr. Somé reports. He was even able to participate with healers in the business of healing; sitting with them all day long and helping them, assisting them in what they were doing with their clients . . . . He spent about four years in my village.” Alex stayed by choice, not because he needed more healing. He felt, “much safer in the village than in America.”

To bring his energy and that of the being from the spiritual realm into alignment, Alex went through a shamanic ritual designed for that purpose, although it was slightly different from the one used with the Dagara people. “He wasn’t born in the village, so something else applied. But the result was similar, even though the ritual was not literally the same,” explains Dr. Somé. The fact that aligning the energy worked to heal Alex demonstrated to Dr. Somé that the connection between other beings and mental illness is indeed universal.

After the ritual, Alex began to share the messages that the spirit being had for this world. Unfortunately, the people he was talking to didn’t speak English (Dr. Somé was away at that point). The whole experience led, however, to Alex’s going to college to study psychology. He returned to the United States after four years because “he discovered that all the things that he needed to do had been done, and he could then move on with his life.”

The last that Dr. Somé heard was that Alex was in graduate school in psychology at Harvard. No one had thought he would ever be able to complete undergraduate studies, much less get an advanced degree.

Dr. Somé sums up what Alex’s mental illness was all about: “He was reaching out. It was an emergency call. His job and his purpose was to be a healer. He said no one was paying attention to that.”

After seeing how well the shamanic approach worked for Alex, Dr. Somé concluded that spirit beings are just as much an issue in the West as in his community in Africa. “Yet the question still remains, the answer to this problem must be found here, instead of having to go all the way overseas to seek the answer. There has to be a way in which a little bit of attention beyond the pathology of this whole experience leads to the possibility of coming up with the proper ritual to help people.

Longing for Spiritual Connection

A common thread that Dr. Somé has noticed in “mental” disorders in the West is “a very ancient ancestral energy that has been placed in stasis, that finally is coming out in the person.” His job then is to trace it back, to go back in time to discover what that spirit is. In most cases, the spirit is connected to nature, especially with mountains or big rivers, he says.

In the case of mountains, as an example to explain the phenomenon, “it’s a spirit of the mountain that is walking side by side with the person and, as a result, creating a time-space distortion that is affecting the person caught in it.” What is needed is a merger or alignment of the two energies, “so the person and the mountain spirit become one.” Again, the shaman conducts a specific ritual to bring about this alignment.

Dr. Somé believes that he encounters this situation so often in the United States because “most of the fabric of this country is made up of the energy of the machine, and the result of that is the disconnection and the severing of the past. You can run from the past, but you can’t hide from it.” The ancestral spirit of the natural world comes visiting. “It’s not so much what the spirit wants as it is what the person wants,” he says. “The spirit sees in us a call for something grand, something that will make life meaningful, and so the spirit is responding to that.”

That call, which we don’t even know we are making, reflects “a strong longing for a profound connection, a connection that transcends materialism and possession of things and moves into a tangible cosmic dimension. Most of this longing is unconscious, but for spirits, conscious or unconscious doesn’t make any difference.” They respond to either.
As part of the ritual to merge the mountain and human energy, those who are receiving the “mountain energy” are sent to a mountain area of their choice, where they pick up a stone that calls to them. They bring that stone back for the rest of the ritual and then keep it as a companion; some even carry it around with them. “The presence of the stone does a lot in tuning the perceptive ability of the person,” notes Dr. Somé. “They receive all kinds of information that they can make use of, so it’s like they get some tangible guidance from the other world as to how to live their life.”

When it is the “river energy,” those being called go to the river and, after speaking to the river spirit, find a water stone to bring back for the same kind of ritual as with the mountain spirit.

“People think something extraordinary must be done in an extraordinary situation like this,” he says. That’s not usually the case. Sometimes it is as simple as carrying a stone.

A Sacred Ritual Approach to Mental Illness

One of the gifts a shaman can bring to the Western world is to help people rediscover ritual, which is so sadly lacking. “The abandonment of ritual can be devastating. From the spiritual view, ritual is inevitable and necessary if one is to live,” Dr. Somé writes in Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community. “To say that ritual is needed in the industrialized world is an understatement. We have seen in my own people that it is probably impossible to live a sane life without it.”

Dr. Somé did not feel that the rituals from his traditional village could simply be transferred to the West, so over his years of shamanic work here, he has designed rituals that meet the very different needs of this culture. Although the rituals change according to the individual or the group involved, he finds that there is a need for certain rituals in general.

One of these involves helping people discover that their distress is coming from the fact that they are “called by beings from the other world to cooperate with them in doing healing work.” Ritual allows them to move out of the distress and accept that calling.

Another ritual need relates to initiation. In indigenous cultures all over the world, young people are initiated into adulthood when they reach a certain age. The lack of such initiation in the West is part of the crisis that people are in here, says Dr. Somé. He urges communities to bring together “the creative juices of people who have had this kind of experience, in an attempt to come up with some kind of an alternative ritual that would at least begin to put a dent in this kind of crisis.”

Another ritual that repeatedly speaks to the needs of those coming to him for help entails making a bonfire, and then putting into the bonfire “items that are symbolic of issues carried inside the individuals . . . It might be the issues of anger and frustration against an ancestor who has left a legacy of murder and enslavement or anything, things that the descendant has to live with,” he explains. “If these are approached as things that are blocking the human imagination, the person’s life purpose, and even the person’s view of life as something that can improve, then it makes sense to begin thinking in terms of how to turn that blockage into a roadway that can lead to something more creative and more fulfilling.”

The example of issues with an ancestors touches on rituals designed by Dr. Somé that address a serious dysfunction in Western society and in the process “trigger enlightenment” in participants. These are ancestral rituals, and the dysfunction they are aimed at is the mass turning-of-the-back on ancestors. Some of the spirits trying to come through, as described earlier, may be “ancestors who want to merge with a descendant in an attempt to heal what they weren’t able to do while in their physical body.”

“Unless the relationship between the living and the dead is in balance, chaos ensues,” he says. “The Dagara believe that, if such an imbalance exists, it is the duty of the living to heal their ancestors. If these ancestors are not healed, their sick energy will haunt the souls and psyches of those who are responsible for helping them.” The rituals focus on healing the relationship with our ancestors, both specific issues of an individual ancestor and the larger cultural issues contained in our past. Dr. Somé has seen extraordinary healing occur at these rituals.

Taking a sacred ritual approach to mental illness rather than regarding the person as a pathological case gives the person affected–and indeed the community at large–the opportunity to begin looking at it from that vantage point too, which leads to “a whole plethora of opportunities and ritual initiative that can be very, very beneficial to everyone present,” states. Dr. Somé.

I thought this was an interesting read and I wanted to share. I am in the process of being taken off the medications which currently manage the effects of my diagnosis of mental illness, and will be seeking the assistance of a shaman in dealing with the outcomes of that decision.

One part of this writing I thought was particularly interesting, was the quoted portion as follows.

“To say that ritual is needed in the industrialized world is an understatement. We have seen in my own people that it is probably impossible to live a sane life without it.”

This ties into the IP, where Alan Watts states that ritual is a key component to a healthy and properly functioning culture.

I think there is a lot of truth in this article. For myself, when I started having visions and the like I was given the "mental health" treatment which only pushed me further to suicidal ideation. When I stopped denying these "shamanic" experiences and established a relationship with my spirit guides (perhaps The Force), I vastly improved.

This stinks heavily of the same kind of theology/spirituality that claims mental illness can be cured with exorcism, and has killed numerous people over the course of thousands of years.

For anyone interested, there is a good book that contains a fairly well-balanced examination of this subject matter from a psychological/anthropological perspective called The World of Shamanism . As best I can recall, the book doesn't take a biased approach to the material, but instead discusses the positives and negatives of shamanic views as seen through a modern lens.

Teresa of Avila believed that some people had mental illness while others had true divine and/or demonic communication. That neither one could easily be distinguished by the average individual. Only those with the gift of discerning spirits could really tell the difference.

There is some degree of merit in the Shamanic understanding of mental illness, but there is equally merit in the approach that western medicine (either psychological or psychiatric) takes. Sometimes the shaman is right, and sometimes it is western medicine that is right. Perhaps the most powerful shaman would be one which combines the best of both worlds, and gain a much deeper understanding of how to tackle the problems that exist within someone that creates mental illnesses sparked by external issues rather than those which are merely biological.

For example, a child which has been abused their entire life and through such abuse creates a second personality. That personality is born to shelter the child from experiences which are too much for them. The separate personality has a life of it's own, fabricated by the interaction it has with others around them. It can be both a curse and a blessing for such a personality to exist. Let's develop this case a bit more:

The separate personality is stronger than the original. They have the ability to tell others off, when manifested the physical ability of the body increases and they can lay someone flat on their back, they can shoot when it is necessary. The perfect soldier- but everything they can do is possible for any other human. They are not easily distinguished unless you know the original personality fairly well. They are bound by a moral code, and will not overstep it. So the personality is not evil in the least- and the two share one body. Never overstepping one another's bounds. They communicate frequently, so are completely aware of one another. Just one retreats when they can no longer handle a crisis.

No psychologist would know about someone with these symptoms, unless an adult was able to pick up on the problem and sought out assistance. But for arguments sake, would you take them to a shaman or a psychologist? Or would you leave them alone to their own devices until a point where it may become a detriment. Keep in mind, the person has had this problem up through their late 20s.

On my part, knowing a few people that this happened with- I would not take them to just any psychologist. Nor would I take them to just any shaman. What I do know for sure, is that the problem cannot be fixed through psychiatry. Because it will take away something from the individual that they need. The second personality is very much a part of who the individual is- and is something that will help them build a stronger healthier lifestyle if they can cultivate the same attributes of personality 2. A shaman that focuses on building more understanding of the second personality through a psychological approach in their own healing methods would be the more helpful person, in my humble opinion.

But this is just one form of mental illness. There are a variety of others, and not all of them are going to be able to be helped by the same means. In the case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for example, Mr. Hyde was a detriment to society. Once he tasted death, there was no turning back. Jekyll had become so reliant on medication to keep Hyde at bay, that he lost sight that he (Jekyll) was the one truly in control and simply needed the release of his "hollow" (for those of you that follow Bleach ). Jekyll already knows that this personality is part of his own, so no amount of spiritual assistance would do him any good. Neither would a psychiatrist for that matter. He already established in his mind that nothing else would work. Psychology -might- be able to do some good, but really you probably would need to put the guy in a straight jacket to protect everyone.

No one approach is going to work for everyone. So to some, the shamanic approach will work, while others it is the psychiatric or psychological, or some combination therein.

My son has autism. Less than a year ago he could not say that a drawing of a cow was a cow at one of them mental tests, even though he quite happily called actual cows "cow". I pointed out to them that he was right, it wasn't a cow, but a drawing of something which supposedly looks like a cow (except it looked nothing like one).

the way I see it, he had figured this out:




(this is not a pipe)

It's supposed to make us question our reality. And I find that mentally ill people (whether mild things like autism or severe issues) do that quite a lot. Make us question our reality that is.

In relation to Jedi teachings "there is no chaos there is harmony" is a perfect fit. No need for faked respect or tolerance, simply an understanding that even the most severely mentally ill people have some sort of logic, and therefore that in a way that is completely foreign to us, they make perfect sense.

I wanted to add that although I got a lot of positive things out of a shamanic approach, there were a lot of valuable things that I have gotten from mental health professionals and the mental health community.

ren wrote: In relation to Jedi teachings "there is no chaos there is harmony" is a perfect fit. No need for faked respect or tolerance, simply an understanding that even the most severely mentally ill people have some sort of logic, and therefore that in a way that is completely foreign to us, they make perfect sense.

damn, ren. you nailed it pretty well.

I suppose, except I deal with alot of mentally ill people ranging all over the spectrum. I have found that they seldom make me question my reality, moreso, they reinforce it, as I am not the one trying to harm themselves or others.

There logic makes sense to them im sure, but that doesnt make me understand why one once tried to stab me with a piece of the I.V. pole they had managed to break off, and then when failing that, tried to stab themselves.

Alathea...if I didn't know better I'd have thought you were talking about me :laugh:

I was abused as a child, not only at home but bullied at the bus stop and school as well...and as a result developed that second self that was stronger and nastier than the one that was usually in the driver's seat....both selves were clever enough to know how not to be discovered and could switch places instantly....I was left to my own devices...through studying philosophy AND psychology I learned how to master both selves....shamanism AND science...it takes both, sadly western culture has, for the most part, abandoned one and embraced only the other..I love the movie "real genius"....there's that point where val kilmer's character is talking about why the character laszlo went crazy " all science and no philosophy"...

Now I combine both, but I'm no fan of how the pharmaceutical companies just throw drugs at everything...drugs with side effects that are worse than what they treat...

I've been able to see auras for some time now and with all spiritual matters I apply some sort of scientific explanation...most often involving energy, which can be manipulated, seen, felt, heard and experienced with our other senses...the force is energy, through it we can achieve many things...