[api]

I love McKenna's raps but I really disagree with him here. I doubt he had much experience with actual schizophrenia, which is horrific and debilitating, and I doubt shamans present or past actually had it. Psychedelic drugs induce a superficially schizophrenia-like state but it's transient and may not actually be much like schizophrenia at all. Visionary, trance, and highly imaginative states are not schizophrenia or even indicative of mental illness.

Real schizophrenia is a hell of paranoia and anxiety and I doubt anyone with a severe case could heal or make art or any of the other things a traditional shaman might do.

[dikdik]

There's some really interesting research out there on schizophrenia.

"Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful." http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/july/voices-culture-luhrm...

[taurath]

The implications are huge - if you are more prone to actively resist or think that its wrong it will actively trigger panic, PTSD, anxiety and paranoia. If you think of them as spirits and your society values them its not a big deal, sometimes even possible helpful?

[interesting_att]

It seems intuitive to me. People who often do psychedelic drugs routinely state that 'resisting' the experience often leads to temporary mental distress.

[benbreen]

Agreed completely. I was sympathetic to arguments like his right up until the time when my brother began acting weird and fell into a downward spiral that ultimately led to a schizophrenia diagnosis. What really sticks out to me is the brain damage-like effects of the disease - not just paranoia and delusions but a total breakdown in verbal and reasoning abilities. What my brother suffers from really is more comparable to Alzheimers or even forms of brain damage or post-stroke states than other mental illnesses I've encountered - it's not so much a visionary state as it is a crippling disability. Really grim stuff, and I suspect that many people who glamorize it don't have firsthand experience with the destruction it can cause.

To end with a somewhat more positive note, the late Oliver Sacks has written beautifully and with great sympathy and humanity about his brother's battle with schizophrenia - I think it's mainly in his "chemical memoir" Uncle Tungsten. I've often wished that he wrote a whole book on the subject but I guess it hit a little too close to home for him.

[api]

> What really sticks out to me is the brain damage-like effects of the disease

Absolutely... there's an incoherence to true (not armchair diagnosed) schizophrenia. The mind falls apart.

Traditional shamans and modern ones like McKenna himself might hold ideas that some might find irrational, but their thought patterns are coherent and their reasoning ability is there. They're lucid and can think. McKenna's brilliant wordsmithing is the polar opposite of what you see with degenerative mental illness.

[petra]

It might not even have to with traditional shamans, it could be simpler than that, from an article by a psychologist:

" I once was lucky enough to spend time in an Egyptian village in the late 1970s, before technology or even electric lights had arrived there. One of the villagers had long, impassioned conversations with people no one else could see. He also had a way of seeing through everyone’s pretensions. He could tell jokes no one else could get away with.

Village life was not utopia. It was difficult in many ways. But this one man, who would almost certainly be diagnosed with schizophrenia if he lived in the developed world, had a secure, safe place in his village. He could wander the wide-ranging mysteries his perceptions opened to him, and if he forgot to feed himself along the way, sooner or later someone would feed him and give him a gentle push toward the door of his home.

Contrast his life with that of a typical client in a mental-health agency in Seattle. I remember one man, early in my training, who gave me the most baffled, hurt look when he asked me, “Why do people on the radio lie to us?”

“I can tell that the woman who’s talking about Macy’s isn’t really happy,” he went on, “but she’s pretending to be happy. Why?”

He felt injured by the woman’s lies, and I could see why, because he had a point. He was accurately perceiving the incongruence in her voice. All of the lying we do to each other in the name of advertising can’t be good for us. But most of us, whose brains aren’t quite as strongly bathed in dopamine in certain places where my client’s brain was constantly overstimulated, can tune advertising out. He couldn’t. "

It's from a fascinating article: http://crosscut.com/2014/05/our-indiviualist-society-breeds-...

[joe_the_user]

Given this is on the level the speculative, one thing to consider is that the initial condition of the schizophrenic might be delusion, hallucination and the disintegration of one's sense of reality - and when that happens, the result in a modern society with no support for the phenomena could be massive stress, stress being a factor which many are today blaming for much mental illness.

That is to say that shamanic rituals and such might be a way to prevent those on the cusp of the classical symptoms of schizophrenia from progressing to full-blown schizophrenia.

[Mz]

As someone who has dealt with some mental health stuff ("crap in my head" /technical term), I can testify firsthand that a) how it gets framed and b) how others around me respond to it make a really huge difference in how it impacts me -- anywhere from "weird, but functional" to "odd source of useful insight" to "losing my shit and I think I shall go play in traffic now."

[mercer]

Indeed! I've been able to compare friends with similar issues either deal with them as a problem to fix or suppress (therapy, medication, etc.), or as a 'weird, but functional' state to 'live with'. The latter, assuming they were functional enough and assuming they found a place, social group and general environment where their 'issues' were accepted, always were much better off.

That's not an argument to avoid therapy or medication, far from it, but at the very least it's should make one pause and think about finding a balance between 'fixing the person with the issues to fit in his current environment' and 'finding an environment/approach for that person to be happy with their issues'. Too often I feel that we err on the side of 'fixing'.

It reminds me a bit of the way bloodletting was once a solution to many things. Turns out that it often made things worse, and only in specific cases actually helps. Let's try to not make that same mistake.

(Also, more recently I've experienced this phenomenon personally, and I notice the same thing. The more I focus on 'fixing' or 'fitting in', the worse I'm off and the worse my problems are. On the other hand, the more I focus on finding a way to be accepted as I am, the better I am able to actually counteract my problems')

[Mz]

Sometimes, a "crazy" person needs justice. Their life needs to be fixed, not their head.

Some of my mental health stuff was rooted in being molested at age 3 or 4. I suppressed those memories until I was in therapy on a different continent, and thus felt safe enough to deal with it. Prior to that, there were clues to the suppressed memories in the form of bad dreams and bizarre thoughts.

I kept a dream journal while in therapy. I still find that talking about my dreams or recording them is useful, yet I have had people tell me "dreams are just gibberish and do not mean anything." These are often smart people who basically swear on a stack of scientific books that they are driven by logic (or well-educated Christians, who fail to see the hypocrisy and irony).

In short, I have been in situations where the truth was so unacceptable to other people that it created mental blocks in me. So, I feel very strongly that dismissing another person's reality is literally crazy-making.

[pekk]

> McKenna's brilliant wordsmithing is the polar opposite of what you see with degenerative mental illness.

But then there are also people like Philip K. Dick, no "armchair diagnosed" schizophrenic.

This might again raise the old issue of whether there are really multiple things we call schizophrenia.

[mtdewcmu]

It's doubtful that schizophrenia is all nurture, but it seems conceivable that coercive circumstances could aggravate a case of schizophrenia, taking a subclinical case and making it floridly symptomatic. Coercion could possibly tip the scales into psychosis.

[Mz]

From what I gather, it is not unusual for schizophrenics to be hospitalized, get better, be sent home to their effed up family and promptly get worse again.

My life experience strongly biases me towards believing that how it gets handled absolutely makes a difference ("it" = any mental health issue).

[harryjo]

It's also not unusual for schizophrenics to be hospitalized, get worse, get over-medicated and locked up.

[hoorayimhelping]

>I doubt anyone with a severe case could heal or make art

Makes me think of Wesley Willis [1] who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and found the only way he could manage it was by making music. Just such a sad and shitty disease.

1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Willis

[DanBC]

> and I doubt anyone with a severe case could heal or make art

...or create an OS?