Using the Mad to Save the Mad

Sociologically, magico-religious healing plays a central and positive role. The magic and faith in the healing powers of the shaman aids in strengthening the group, tribe or caste by defining a common foe, and in identifying the evil, invisible spirit that has been causing illness.

In this way, it is possible to control one’s own environment and the immediate neighbourhood and to influence it.

Moreover, the healing ritual of the shaman late into the night helps to sublimate difficult somatic instincts and to channel them in a socially acceptable and legal way, without being stigmatized in the society as being abnormal or an ill-person.

In our society we have abnormal and ill people who are stigmatized daily as "mentally ill." While being educated about their illness and treated, the medication may affect them so that they are unable to work when exposed to the stresses of the modern workplace.

At the same time, conventional medicine has a stranglehold on the people. If one is a shaman, then most doctors will jealously guard their territory and look down upon alternative forms of healing, even to the point of subjecting shamans to public ridicule and even stigmatizing them as mentally ill and hospitalizing them. All this does is make modern medicine look bad.

While traditional folk medicine has a long tradition in Nepal, it must not be forgotten that what is folk medicine now used to be common practice. It wasn't until the 19th century that doctors began to believe in the disease model of health. Since then, health-care may have made leaps and bounds technologically but overall it's also created problems especially within psychiatry.

If we think of each potential schizophrenic as a would-be shaman, ignorant of hir role in society, then we have here a pool of new medical workers who can augment the hospitals and doctors in their work. While it will be tough to weed out people who are too sick to decide the best health-care for others, the results will be worth it because we will have trained health-care workers supporting doctors and hospitals.

Rather than medicating a potential schizophrenic, it would be more humane to have hir employed. Since the only purpose of medication is social control, this is malpractice. For mentally ill people who are employed suffer less from their illness than their unemployed brothers and sisters.

Note that the shaman is not schizophrenic because rather than being impaired by anxiety and fear, he is channeling his anxiety and fear in socially acceptable way, rather than being plagued by insomnia's nightmares and the descent into mania and madness.