3rd Eye Watch January 2015 (1 yr Anniversary Edition) | Page 20

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The Shamanic View of Mental Illness
By Nana Baakan
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."