What a Shaman sees in a mental Hospital.

This came across my feed and thought it was an interesting read. I thought I would share with you.

http://themindunleashed.org/2014/08/shaman-sees-mental-hospital.html

I knew it! My suspicions are confirmed.

For a long time I've suspected that the so-called hallucinations or "crazy" behavior that plagues the mentally ill, are in fact a spiritual matter. Simply fascinating.

Thanks for sharing Jedi Roz!

Glad you enjoyed it. There are many studies being done to show light in how western medicine simply cannot account for the many tremendous things the mind is truly capable of. I cannot remember where, I will try to find it another set of papers/research that talks about a lot of our modern mental diseases ares just that. Modern. That we did not see the huge amounts of mental disorders even two hundred years ago that we see now. It's not to say they didn't exist, or that just because we didn't have a name for them we couldn't label the properly but that instead we are creating more demons in a system that relies on you being sick instead of healthy. In a tribal society it would make sense that people would have more coping ways to deal with the problems we see/face today. I'm reminded of the story of Anneliese Micheal, (her story inspired the movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose) where they said that her possession was actually made worse by the use of antipsychotic drugs that were being heavily used.

Now I'm not saying that we should immediately dump our medicine cabinets and run off to the closest thing to a shaman/medicine man/healer we can find but simply know our minds can do really crazy things and that we need to be aware of what is truly going on. Too many people are way too out of touch with their own bodies.

Jedi_Roz wrote: ....but simply know our minds can do really crazy things and that we need to be aware of what is truly going on. Too many people are way too out of touch with their own bodies.

Amen to that...

While "stress" is the natural response of a living organism to it's environment (ie. no stress = no life), it seems counter-intuitive that with all our modern conveniences, we should have more stress...

I surmise that as we get more out of touch with ourselves, we create more Other or "environment" to which our minds have to react. By increasing the "environment" to which we must respond, we increase stress levels. Stress can have an incredibly powerful mind-bender, perception-warper effect on our minds...

The mind-body connexion leads to real physical effects from chronic high-stress levels... A positive feedback loop with negative repercussions...

When this topic came up before , I was very firmly against the title concept. There are times when a spiritual viewpoint is very necessary for healing, and there are a great many times when it is not. There are many times that the maladies of the soul will need to be cured before the body can be repaired. There are also many times this is not the case.

The reason I hate articles like this is because there is a certain level of wisdom and learning in people that is generally targeted by articles such as this. You've heard the saying "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"? That problem exists everywhere. As such, that "one semester's worth" of spiritual healing has everything looking like a problem that reiki or cleansing herbs can solve. "One semester's worth" of training in spirit removal leads to "relocators" who think everything that isn't them has no place on this plane. This same kind of theory is why amateur, non-skeptic exorcists get people killed by treating medically-apparent mental illness as though there are demons inside a person that need to be forcefully removed.

The Catholic Church (and every respectable independent exorcist) knows that's not how things should be handled. The first step is to rule out anything in the natural--is it a problem with nutrition, with brain chemistry, is it something that counseling could help--before even entertaining the notion that it may be something extra-physical.

Articles like this one don't really portray that sense of responsibility to their general audience. This piece treats mental illness like a cocoon a shamanic healer will emerge from. What that worldview overlooks is that in most cultures based on subsistance living (which animist cultures almost always are), the only place where a deformed, disabled, mentally ill, dysmorphic, elderly, or frail individual could have a place they didn't constantly have to defend was to answer the call of the spirits. The Warcraft-style image of physically great and muscularly impressive shaman is largely a modern invention; those who traditionally held the position were people who had few other ways to contribute meaningfully to a society that could bear no dead weight.

Not every mentally ill person is a "healer waiting to be born." In fact, most of them just have serious trauma or faulty brain chemistry, and need to be treated as thoroughly as modern psychiatric and medical science will allow. The idea that comes across, to the average reader of this article, is likely to be that "nobody's crazy, they're just undergoing a spiritual metamorphosis to become a great healer," and that kind of thinking is dangerous to everyone involved, and highly irresponsible. It may be true on a case-by-case basis, but in any kind of general sense, it is horribly irresponsible.

I don't often agree with Steam, but this is one of the rare times I find myself doing so. Mental illness is not, and should not immediately be described as a spiritual matter/deficiency or the like. More often times than not it's the result of genetics, something that was introduced through the womb, etc. The problem is usually (not always) a biological one, and should be treated as such...

steamboat28 wrote: When this topic came up before , I was very firmly against the title concept. There are times when a spiritual viewpoint is very necessary for healing, and there are a great many times when it is not. There are many times that the maladies of the soul will need to be cured before the body can be repaired. There are also many times this is not the case.

The reason I hate articles like this is because there is a certain level of wisdom and learning in people that is generally targeted by articles such as this. You've heard the saying "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"? That problem exists everywhere. As such, that "one semester's worth" of spiritual healing has everything looking like a problem that reiki or cleansing herbs can solve. "One semester's worth" of training in spirit removal leads to "relocators" who think everything that isn't them has no place on this plane. This same kind of theory is why amateur, non-skeptic exorcists get people killed by treating medically-apparent mental illness as though there are demons inside a person that need to be forcefully removed.

The Catholic Church (and every respectable independent exorcist) knows that's not how things should be handled. The first step is to rule out anything in the natural--is it a problem with nutrition, with brain chemistry, is it something that counseling could help--before even entertaining the notion that it may be something extra-physical.

Articles like this one don't really portray that sense of responsibility to their general audience. This piece treats mental illness like a cocoon a shamanic healer will emerge from. What that worldview overlooks is that in most cultures based on subsistance living (which animist cultures almost always are), the only place where a deformed, disabled, mentally ill, dysmorphic, elderly, or frail individual could have a place they didn't constantly have to defend was to answer the call of the spirits. The Warcraft-style image of physically great and muscularly impressive shaman is largely a modern invention; those who traditionally help the position were people who had few other ways to contribute meaningfully to a society that could bear no dead weight.

Not every mentally ill person is a "healer waiting to be born." In fact, most of them just have serious trauma or faulty brain chemistry, and need to be treated as thoroughly as modern psychiatric and medical science will allow. The idea that comes across, to the average reader of this article, is likely to be that "nobody's crazy, they're just undergoing a spiritual metamorphosis to become a great healer," and that kind of thinking is dangerous to everyone involved, and highly irresponsible. It may be true on a case-by-case basis, but in any kind of general sense, it is horribly irresponsible.

Steam you are Awesome!

Thank you for this. It is very true and while I totally agree I also think that unfortunately there are many things at work. Not necessarily demons, Chemical imbalances and such that certainty can seriously affect a person. I didn't realize this topic had been brought up before otherwise I would have just commented on that thread.

Sadly too many people will read this with a glance and not look deeper. Look at all the "new age" wanna be healers/shamans out there. Too many people read one book by Silver Hawk Mouse Tail and think they are magically all of a sudden some kind of guru. Nothing replaces a society of training and Nothing can replace a great doctor or physiologist.

steamboat28 wrote: ...those who traditionally help the position were people who had few other ways to contribute meaningfully to a society that could bear no dead weight.

I do agree with your assessment of the shaman-types having to find a niche to survive, "brains over brawn". I don't agree that they were dead-weight or defectives. They survived precisely because they made a contribution. You can't propose survival of the fittest and then also imply they broke the rule.

The shaman became the priests, warrior monks and dare I propose, Jedi...

steamboat28 wrote: Not every mentally ill person is a "healer waiting to be born." In fact, most of them just have serious trauma or faulty brain chemistry, and need to be treated as thoroughly as modern psychiatric and medical science will allow. The idea that comes across, to the average reader of this article, is likely to be that "nobody's crazy, they're just undergoing a spiritual metamorphosis to become a great healer," and that kind of thinking is dangerous to everyone involved, and highly irresponsible. It may be true on a case-by-case basis, but in any kind of general sense, it is horribly irresponsible.

Allopathic medicine has not seen stellar success in the mental health arena either.

What I take from the article is the reminder that we have not succeeded with our current models and methods.

Mental Illness has to have a brain chemistry vector, that is undeniable, but what is driving that chemistry?

If Abraham were alive today and he tried to sacrifice his son because of voices in his head, he'd be medicated and locked up... There would be no prophetic story because we don't tolerate that stuff any longer, we've changed...

What we have right now isn't the we have, it's all we have... I don't advocate the chucking of meds either. I want to see rigorous, double-blind assessments for treatments (which is expensive and time consuming), but there is no denying that we need a new paradigm for Mental Health, because we're not currently having great success...

Doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different outcome...

Arkayik wrote:

The shaman became the priests, warrior monks and dare I propose, Jedi...

Good point.

If Abraham were alive today and he tried to sacrifice his son because of voices in his head, he'd be medicated and locked up... There would be no prophetic story because we don't tolerate that stuff any longer, we've changed...
.

YES! This EXACTLY!

I was raised, in my youth, in a spiritual tradition that says that my depression isn't a chemical imbalance, or the result of a hard life, but rather it exists because demons follow me around making me sad because I don't love Jesus hard enough. That is not only a horrible way to treat another human being ("your devotion to deity is less than mine and that's why you want to kill yourself"), but it's also keeping people who have legitimate issues from getting the help they actually, factually need.

On the other hand, I once got a phone call from a friend of a friend who was having horrible dreams, visions, and waking nightmares. "Come fix it, we think she's being haunted." The first things I asked were about her mental health: had she seen a counselor, had there been anything in a reasonable time period that she'd had trouble getting over, was there a recent death in the family, etc. At the end of the session I told gave her a little trinket and told her it would help until she could get herself to a qualified therapist. I told her that once she'd done that and either gotten a diagnosis or was given a clean bill, we'd talk again.

And I know that my own mental issues aren't because I'm inadequately worshipping the great ZZ Top member in the sky, and thusly, have taken down my demonic deflector shields. I've had problems like that in the past, but my depression is all me, all the time, all up in my head. So I might ask folks to pray for me, or send me light, or whatever fluffy-bunny bull***t they do, but I'm still in therapy looking for results.

Is there a time when the statements in this article are true? Yes. Is it often? No.