Week 3 - Giverny Yang
Giverny Yang
ASA 189B
Week 3
Unknowingly being a medium in Westernized society could have you ended up in a mental institution. Being able to communicate with the spiritual world and the living world might be something you are unfamiliar with and might confuse you. If you take this issue to the doctors in the West, you will probably end up being diagnosed as mentally insane. However, this might not be the case for you if you were to have been in an indigenous society. Societal differences explain these symptoms differently. What Shamans call a healer, Westernized society calls them mentally ill. According to "What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital," Dr. Some believes that the same symptoms one is experiencing in a mental hospital are the same symptoms he witnesses in his village. To him, those are not mental illnesses. People with the ability to communicate with both worlds are supposed to be taught to be a healer. They are to deliver the messages they are being sent from the other world. They are to merge the worlds by being the messenger. In western society, western practices provide pharmaceutical drugs to numb these messages they are hearing and feed the patients diagnoses and allow them to believe they are not in their right mind. The West does not have enough knowledge of the spiritual world and does not practice the rituals that come with it. They turn to practical medicine to rid the problems away. These unborn or unleashed healers are categorized with paranoia, hallucinations, and delusions, when they are actually being sent to spread their spirits' messages. In order to heal them, they are to deliver the messages such as Alex in the article. He was taken to Africa and actual rituals were done on him, he told his messages and his life returned back to normal. He was able to return to America and he even went to Harvard for graduate school. Instead of being thrown into mental hospitals and heavily prescribed drugs, the West should also adopt some of these beliefs in order to prevent people being wrongly thrown into mental wards. How long will it take society to accept these indigenous beliefs and rituals?
ASA 189B
Week 3
Unknowingly being a medium in Westernized society could have you ended up in a mental institution. Being able to communicate with the spiritual world and the living world might be something you are unfamiliar with and might confuse you. If you take this issue to the doctors in the West, you will probably end up being diagnosed as mentally insane. However, this might not be the case for you if you were to have been in an indigenous society. Societal differences explain these symptoms differently. What Shamans call a healer, Westernized society calls them mentally ill. According to "What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital," Dr. Some believes that the same symptoms one is experiencing in a mental hospital are the same symptoms he witnesses in his village. To him, those are not mental illnesses. People with the ability to communicate with both worlds are supposed to be taught to be a healer. They are to deliver the messages they are being sent from the other world. They are to merge the worlds by being the messenger. In western society, western practices provide pharmaceutical drugs to numb these messages they are hearing and feed the patients diagnoses and allow them to believe they are not in their right mind. The West does not have enough knowledge of the spiritual world and does not practice the rituals that come with it. They turn to practical medicine to rid the problems away. These unborn or unleashed healers are categorized with paranoia, hallucinations, and delusions, when they are actually being sent to spread their spirits' messages. In order to heal them, they are to deliver the messages such as Alex in the article. He was taken to Africa and actual rituals were done on him, he told his messages and his life returned back to normal. He was able to return to America and he even went to Harvard for graduate school. Instead of being thrown into mental hospitals and heavily prescribed drugs, the West should also adopt some of these beliefs in order to prevent people being wrongly thrown into mental wards. How long will it take society to accept these indigenous beliefs and rituals?
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