Jade Garcia - Week 5

Mental Illness or Spiritual Awakening

When it comes to mental health and spirituality, where do we draw the line? The way that mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, bipolar disorder somehow align with a false reality of one self is quite fascinating as to how one can look at it through science but also how to look at mental illnesses in a spiritual way. In the article "What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital" by Stephanie Marohn discusses the topic of mental disorders and how they are looked at in western culture v.s in other countries and what we tend to do is dope people up who we assume automatically has a mental condition. Marohn writes, "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." (Marohn) I think it's important for one to think about the way our minds works but also how a "mental illness" is actually defined in cultures because growing up with a western culture perspective we see mental illness as something wrong and automatically we assume we can cure it with pills or therapy. What we don't acknowledge is how medication that is prescribe can actually affected the person even more. It is fascinating that others can see mental illness as a spiritual awakening or seen as a way of connecting to higher power. I believe that the view of a condition is so important to understand because the way we view and understand things has a lot to do the way we depict them.  Its just the way everyone experiences their own form of spiritually and connection to the higher power.