Mostly not, on the evidence, though the question has been argued for over a century. Some early scholars saw shamans as mentally disturbed, partly because of their dramatic trances and the crises that often began their careers; later researchers pointed out that shamans function well in their own societies, keep control of their states and can be told apart from people who are mentally ill, as their own communities did. Therapeutic Shamanism holds that the mark of a shaman is the ability to leave ordinary reality at will and to come back at will, that shamanic cultures clearly distinguished healthy shamanic experience from madness, and that the question also needs turning round, to ask how healthy our own culture’s idea of normal is.
Why have shamans been called mad? #
Because of what observers saw and did not understand. Shamans, the anthropologist Piers Vitebsky writes, have been called madmen and madwomen, persecuted throughout history, and seen as all things to all people.1 Western observers saw dramatic trances and heard accounts of the illness or breakdown through which many shamans were called, and some concluded that only a mentally disturbed person could become a shaman. The ethnopsychiatrist George Devereux put that view most bluntly in the 1950s and early 1960s. The history of that view, and the turn away from it, are told in Were traditional shamans neurodivergent? and What is shaman’s sickness (initiatory illness)?
What did each side of the argument say? #
Those who saw a likeness to mental illness did not all mean it as a dismissal. The psychologist Julian Silverman argued in 1967 that the often noted similarities between the psychotic-like behaviour of shamans and that of people with acute schizophrenia reflect deeper similarities in the thinking processes behind them. For him the great difference lay in how the culture responded: where a culture accepts the way a person resolves such a crisis, the experience is typically beneficial; where it does not, the person’s suffering tends to grow worse.2
Others stressed how differently shamans actually live and function. The medical historian Erwin Ackerknecht, writing in 1943 and quoted by Silverman, called medicine men “autonormal”: normal in the sense of functioning effectively in their own societies.3 The psychologist Richard Noll, comparing the two states directly in 1983, concluded that the idea of shamanic states as a kind of schizophrenia does not hold, because “significant phenomenological differences exist between the shamanic and schizophrenic states of consciousness”.4 The psychologist Holger Kalweit gives an example from the people of St Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, who lived by hunting: their shamanic candidates were said to go through days of apparent madness, yet during their training the candidate was “sick and confused, but not really mentally ill. The other members of the tribe are well able to tell the difference.”5 What recent researchers have found is set out in Were traditional shamans neurodivergent?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism tell a shaman from someone who is mentally ill? #
By the ability to come and go. A shaman is someone who can leave ordinary reality at will, travel in the shamanic realms, and then come back to ordinary reality at will. The ability to return at will is one of the differences between shamanism and psychosis, because being stuck in the shamanic realms and unable to return would indeed be a form of psychosis.6
Shamanism is sometimes described as having one foot in this world and one in the other. To live shamanically is to be aware of both realities and to be able to move between them at will; having both feet in shamanic reality all the time is not shamanism, but madness. It is often said in the West that all madness is really a form of shamanic awakening, and a shamanic awakening can indeed feel like madness, largely because people in the modern world do not understand what is happening to them. But it is not at all true that all madness is a shamanic awakening. Shamanic cultures clearly differentiate between healthy shamanic experience on the one hand and madness on the other.7 GroundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this, keeping a foot firmly planted in this world, is the bedrock of the practice, and that is the difference between healthy shamanism and psychosis.7 See How is shamanic journeying different from psychosis?
Who decides what counts as mentally ill? #
Each culture does, and that is part of the problem with the question. Kalweit points out that within the framework of Western civilisation, the distinctive ways of tribal peoples have often been described in the language of psychopathology.8 A shaman’s experiences may look strange from outside whilst having quite a different meaning within their own culture.
Therapeutic Shamanism takes this further. From a shamanic perspective, the Taker society that most of us live in is itself a deeply psychopathic one, and growing up in it we take on ways of thinking that are profoundly un-shamanic, without usually realising it.9 The shaman’s role was always to stand far enough outside the culture to see it clearly. So the question is not only whether shamans fitted modern ideas of mental health, but how healthy the culture making that judgement is. See What are the Wild Mind and the Domesticated Mind?
Does this mean mental illness is really a shamanic gift? #
No. Recognising that shamans were not simply mentally ill does not mean that everyone who is mentally ill is a shaman in the making. For anyone who is psychotic or having psychotic episodes, the starting point is grounding, not journeying.10 See Is shamanic work safe if I have a mental health condition?
