A Shamanic Perspective on Schizophrenia

What does a father do when hope is gone that his only son can ever lead anything close to a "normal" life? That's the question that haunted Dick Russell in the fall of 2011, when his son, Franklin, was thirty-two. At the age of seventeen, Franklin had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. For years he spent time in and out of various hospitals, and even went through periods of adamantly denying that Dick was actually his father. Desperately seeking an alternative to the medical model's medication regimen, Dick introduces Franklin to West African Dagara shaman and writer Malidoma Patrice Somé, Phd. Somé helps Franklin in a way Western medicine couldn't, bringing to light the psychic capabilities behind the seemingly delusional thought patterns, as well as his artistic talents.

The Dagara people of West Africa have an entirely different view of what is actually happening to someone who has been diagnosed as "mentally ill." In the shamanic view, mental illness signals "the birth of a healer," explains 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.

A different perspective opens up very different possibilities. The Dagara people use ritual to relieve the suffering at the core of "mental illness." According to Somé, ritual can open the way for the individual's healing relationship with helping spirits that supports a cure or definitive movement out of the "mentally ill" state of being and back into the world as an individual better equipped than most to give their gifts to the world. To learn more, look inside Dick Russell's memoir, "My Mysterious Son: A Life-Changing Passage Between Schizophrenia and Shamanism."