In a nut shell, the psychiatrist R D Laing found the cure to Schizophrenia in the 1960’s. He set up safe houses for those going through the experience and let them go through the process. No drugs. His patients were allowed to rant and rave and hallucinate and talk to things. All that. It might have taken a few months, but eventually they would come out the end of it “Weller than well” as R D Laing put it. They had been cured !
So why are we still, 50 years later, drugging and damaging people with psychiatric drugs ?
Look. This is a real tragedy for this society and I will tell you why.
Schizophrenia is Shamanism, or more specifically Shamanising …
“Significant differences between acute schizophrenics and shamans are not found in the sequence of underlying psychological events that define their abnormal experiences.”
Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia, Julian Silverman.
So the Shaman goes on a heroic quest. They win things for their people. Heal people. Commune with spirits, discover things and solve problems. In our society we call them artists, psychics, musicians and scientists. In Shamanic societies the Shaman is a highly respected figure. In our society the person going through a Shamanic/Schizophrenic experience has been turned into a figure of fear. This is truly a great tragedy. Those are the people who go off win Holy Grail’s for this society. Yet malicious psychiatry destroys them. How many discoveries and gifts have been stolen from this society by these predatory monsters called malicious psychiatry ?
Terrence McKenna said “this society does not have a frame work to fit Shamanism/Schizophrenia into”. I’ve thought about this myself. On the most part if someone is going through something most people recognise they are struggling with something. Unless they are literally running around punching people in the face they are usually left alone by most people. There is actually a frame work for this state already in place. It’s called mythology, legends and fairy tales. This is the territory Carl Gustav Jung defined so well.
In fact at the core of our society is the heroic mythological quest story. It was Joseph Campbell who defined this so well (The Hero With a Thousand Faces) and it was George Lucas who was to go on and borrow much of his research for use in the Star Wars films. Think about it. Every action film and series has the same trope in it. Ordinary person meets evil. They pay some horrible cost but they then go through some extraordinary journey where they discover things about themselves that they did not know. They are severely tested, but if they persevere then they ultimately triumph over the evil that attacked them in the first place. Good triumphs over evil. Everyone loves watching this story at one time or another.
Guess what malicious psychiatry looks like ? Yep. That very same evil that human beings have always had to fight at one time or another. They tick all the mythological tick boxes. Take the film Excalibur for example. An evil casts a pox across the land and darkens everything. The people suffer and are not saved until the Knights really get on their horses and do what they have to do. Immediately life starts coming back into the land as depicted in John Boorman’s classic scene where the Knights are riding through fields of trees that blossom into full bloom at the Knights in shining armour bring life, win life, back into the land. This is the way it has always been.
Saddle up Shaman’s !
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