For Frank Russell, reinterpreting his schizophrenia as shamanism helped his symptoms.
Can schizophrenia and shamanism really be connected? This article chronicles one father’s effort to help his schizophrenic son, and how meeting a shaman from the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso changed the way they looked at his illness and how he has been healing using the ancient wisdom preserved in this tribe. Western psychologists have also been exploring some of the same ideas of how shamanism and schizophrenia may be connected and how developing nations like the Dagara, who have a collective consciousness as opposed to the individualistic consciousness of Western nations, help them heal. Do we have something to learn from the traditions embedded in the culture of the Dagara tribe? Community matters. This is also congruent with the experiences of the Grapevine Center’s Drop-In Center, over its history of providing acceptance, support, and community to those with Mental Health issues.
Abridged Extracts:
It starts without warning—or rather, the warnings are there, but your ability to detect them exists only in hindsight. First you’re sitting in the car with your son, then he tells you: “I cannot find my old self again.” You think, well, teenagers say dramatic stuff like this all the time. Then he’s refusing to do his homework, he’s writing suicidal messages on the wall in black magic marker, he’s trying to cut himself with a razor blade. You sit down with him; you two have a long talk. A week later, he runs home from a nighttime gathering at his friend’s apartment, he’s bursting through the front door, shouting about how his friends are trying to kill him. He spends the night crouching in his mother’s old room, clutching a stuffed animal to his chest. He’s 17 years old at this point, and you are his father, Dick Russell, a traveler, a former staff reporter for Sports Illustrated, but a father first and foremost. It is the turn of the 21st century.
Up until this point, your son, Frank, has been a fully functional kid, if somewhat odd. An eccentric genius, socially inept yet insightful—perhaps an artist in the making, you thought. Now you are being told your son’s quirks stem from pathology, his mystic phrases are not indications of creative genius but of neural networks misfiring. You sit with Frank as he receives his diagnosis, schizophrenia, and immediately all sorts of associations flood into your head. In the United States, a diagnosis of schizophrenia often means homelessness, joblessness, inability to maintain close relationships, and increased susceptibility to addiction. Your son is now dangling off this cliff. So you hand him over to the doctors, who prescribe him antipsychotics, and when he balloons up to 300 pounds,1 and they tell you he’s just being piggish, you believe them.2
Franklin Russell as a child, before any symptoms of schizophrenia had surfaced. Photo Courtesy of Dick Russell
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Malidoma [a shaman of the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso, with several American academic degrees] is not the first person to posit a link between shamanism and schizophrenia. The psychiatrist Joseph Polimeni wrote an entire book on the subject, called Shamans Among Us. There, Polimeni noted several connections: Both shamans and schizophrenic people believe they have magical abilities, hear voices, and have out-of-body experiences. Shamans become shamans in their late teens to early 20s, about the same age range that schizophrenia is typically diagnosed (17-25) in men. Both schizophrenics and shamans are more commonly male than female. And the prevalence of shamans (say one per 60-150 people, the estimated size of most early human communities) is similar to the global prevalence of schizophrenia (around 1 percent).
This theory isn’t widely supported. Critics note that shamans appear to be able to enter and exit their shamanic states at will, while schizophrenic people have no control over their visions. But Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, has hypothesized a similar and more widely accepted theory:
Many spiritual leaders, like shamans and prophets, may have “schizotypal personality disorder.” People with this diagnosis are often relatives of schizophrenics and possess milder versions of some symptoms, such as peculiar ways of speaking or “metamagical” thinking, which is linked to creativity and high IQ. This profile sounds like it may fit Malidoma, who never experienced a “break” but whose brother and sister both did.
Both shamans and schizophrenic people believe they have magical abilities, hear voices, and have out-of-body experiences.
Having a dissolved self can make it immensely hard for a schizophrenic person to present a coherent picture of themselves to the world, and to relate to other, more gelled selves. “Schizophrenia is a disease whose main manifestations are sufferers’ [diminished] abilities to engage in social interactions,” says Matcheri S. Keshavan, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and an expert on schizophrenia. And yet, ironically, people with schizophrenia need others just as much as socially capable people do, if not more. “A problem with schizophrenia is that however much they want [social interactions], they often lose the skills needed for navigating them,” Keshavan says.
Certain structures and regions in the brain are thought to be particularly important in constructing our sense of self. One is the meeting place between the two middle lobes of the brain: the temporal lobe, which translates sight and hearing into language, emotion, and memory, and the parietal lobe, which integrates all five senses to locate the body in space. This region, called the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ, assembles information from these and other lobes into a mental representation of one’s physical body, and its place in space and time. It also plays a role in what’s called theory of mind, the ability to recognize your thoughts and desires as your own and to understand that other people have mental states that are separate from yours.
When the TPJ is altered or disturbed, putting oneself together becomes difficult and sometimes painful. Body Dysmorphic Disorder, characterized by extreme preoccupation with imagined physical defects, is thought to arise from faulty TPJ interplay.3 Researchers see atypical TPJ activity in Alzheimer’s patients, Parkinson’s patients, and amnesiacs.
Schizophrenia is intimately related to TPJ messiness. It affects theory of mind; schizophrenic patients often believe that others harbor animosity toward them, and when they perform mental tasks related to theory of mind, their TPJ activity either spikes or crashes. Researchers have induced the kind of ghostly visions and out-of-body experiences that some schizophrenics experience, simply by stimulating the TPJ with electrodes. The psychiatrist Lot Postmes calls this “perceptual incoherence,” noting that the jumbled assortment of sensory information leads to an untethering of ego: “a normal sense of self, as a feeling of unitary entity, the ‘I,’ that owns and authors its thoughts, emotions, body, and actions.”4
“Social cognition,” wrote Bernard Crespi, a biologist at Simon Fraser University, in Canada, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics (2008,), is “underdeveloped in autism, but hyper-developed to dysfunction in psychosis (schizophrenia).” In other words, where an autistic person’s sense of self is cripplingly narrow, schizophrenics’ selves are cripplingly expansive: They believe they are many people at once, and see motive and meaning everywhere.
As difficult as they may be to live with, these perceptual distortions can make schizophrenic people more creative. Schizophrenics tend to see themselves as more imaginative than others, and to embark on more artistic projects.5 Numerous people with schizophrenia have said that their creative thoughts and delusions come from the same source: Poet Rainer Maria Rilke refused treatment for his visions, saying “don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee, too.” The author Stephen Mitchell, who translated many of Rilke’s works, put it this way: “He was dealing with an existential problem opposite from the one that most of us need to resolve: Whereas we find a thick, if translucent, barrier between self and other, he was often without even the thinnest differentiating membrane.”
Frank Russell reported feeling something similar. “He told me he feels like a mirror, reflecting what’s inside people,” his father, Dick, writes. “It was hard for him to sort out what’s him and what’s them.”
“Don’t take away my devils, my angels may flee, too!”
Several studies by the World Health Organization have compared outcomes of schizophrenia in the U.S. and Western Europe with outcomes in developing nations like Ghana and India. After following patients for five years, researchers found that those in developing countries fared “considerably better” than those in the developed countries.8 One study found that
nearly 37 percent of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in developing countries were asymptomatic after two years, compared to only 15.5 percent in the U.S. and Europe. In India, about half of people diagnosed with schizophrenia are able to hold down jobs, compared to only 15 percent in the U.S.9
Many researchers have theorized that these counter-intuitive findings stem from a key cultural difference: developing countries tend to be collectivistic or interdependent, meaning the predominant mindset is community-oriented.10, 11 Developed countries, on the other hand, are usually individualistic—autonomy and self-motivated achievement are considered the norm. Other variables in developing countries can, at times, complicate this dichotomy—for instance, the relative scarcity of medication, and other cultural factors such as stigma. However, one study of “sociocentric” differences between ethnic minority groups within the U.S. found results suggesting that “certain protective aspects of ethnic minority culture”—namely, the prevalence of two collectivist values, empathy and social competence—“result in a more benign symptomatic expression of schizophrenia.”
“Take a young man with schizophrenia who’s socially unable to engage,” Keshavan says. “In a collectivistic culture, he’s still able to survive in a joint family with a less fortunate brother or cousin … he’ll feel supported and contained. Whereas in a more individualistic society, he’ll feel let go, and not particularly included. For that reason, schizophrenia tends to be highly disabling [in individualistic countries].” Individualist cultures also “[diminish] motivation to acknowledge illness and seek help from others, whether from therapists or in clinics or residential programs.” notes Russell Schutt, a leading expert on the sociology of schizophrenia.
When Malidoma first met Frank one evening over dinner in Jamaica, he recognized the man’s likeness to himself instantly. “The connection we had was immediately clear,” he says. As soon as schizophrenic met shaman, the latter shook his head and clasped Frank’s hands as if they’d known each other for years. He told Dick that Frank was “like a colleague!” Malidoma believes that Frank is a U.S. version of a titiyulo; in fact, there is a version of a titiyulo in pretty much every culture, he says. He also believes that one cannot choose to become a titiyulo: It happens to you. “Every shaman started with a crisis similar to those here who are called schizophrenic, psychotic. Shamanism or titiyulo journeys begin with a breakdown of the psyche,” he says. “One day they’re fine, normal, like everyone else. The next day they’re acting really weird and dangerously toward themselves and the village”—seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, acting paranoid, shouting.
If the broken-down person does not have a community around him or her, he or she may fail to heal.
When this happens, the Dagara people begin a collective effort to heal the broken-down person; one marked by loud rituals involving dancing and cheering and with an underlying current of celebration. Malidoma remembers watching his sister go through it. “My sister was screaming into the night,” he says, “but people were playing around her.” Usually, the uncontrollable breakdowns last about eight months, after which effectively new people emerge. “You have to go through this radical initiation where you can become the larger than life person the community needs for their own benefit, you know?” If the broken-down person does not have a community around him or her, Malidoma says, he or she may fail to heal. He believes this is what happened to Frank.
It takes a village: Malidoma Patrice Some sees himself as a titiyulo or a shaman. He believes belonging to a community is a vital aspect of controlling symptoms commonly associated with schizophrenia.
Had Frank been born into the Dagara tribe, and experienced the same breakdown at age 17 that led him to run from his friend’s apartment, Malidoma tells me that the community would have immediately rallied around him, performing the same rituals that his sister experienced. Following this intervention, his tribe members would begin the work of healing Frank and re-integrating him back into the community; once he was ready, he’d receive a prominent position. “He’d be known as a man of spirit, who’d be able to provide insight into the deep problems of the people around them,” he says.
Whether or not Frank’s psychosis would have made him a shaman in another time or place, three central factors are present in the Dagara tribal intervention (early intervention, community, and purpose) that parallel the three factors that Keshavan, Schutt, Rosenheck, and others cite as complements to pharmaceutical drugs: early intervention,16 community support, and employment. Frank had perhaps missed the boat on the Dagara initiation ceremony, but Malidoma advised his father to incorporate other aspects of his approach into his son’s life, including rituals and other purposeful activities.
After returning from Jamaica back home to Boston, Frank kept in touch with Malidoma by phone. He and Dick traveled to the homes and clinics of various alternative healers, who met Frank’s delusions with warmth and encouragement. Dick started to encourage his son more, too. When Frank asked Dick to include some of his thoughts in the memoir he was writing, including the idea that “one additive to beer is molten dolphin sweat,” Dick dutifully complied. Rather than provoke more delusional behavior in Frank, Dick says, these experiences have had a “grounding effect.” They show him he has friends and family who respect who he is and all that he’s capable of. “If some of [Franklin’s] dreams exist only in the imaginative realm, so be it,” Dick wrote in his memoir, My Mysterious Son: A Life-Changing Passage Between Schizophrenia and Shamanism. “I’ve learned the importance of this for him.”
The effects have been profound. Five years ago, before meeting Malidoma, Frank was less motivated to seek social encounters. At 37 he took trips to New Mexico and Maine, and took classes in mechanical engineering. Today, he is a remarkably inventive jazz pianist. His room is filled with his paintings and metalwork, rife with archetypal imagery and hieroglyphic languages of his own creation.
Self-expression: Later in life, Frank found solace by expressing himself through art. On the left, he drums in Jamaica. On the right, one of his paintings. Courtesy of Dick Russell
He’s not cured. He still occasionally hears voices and harbors delusions. And he still lives in a group home. But he has been able to cut his medication in half again. He has lost weight, and his diabetes has become asymptomatic. He’s more courteous, alert, and engaged, his father and doctors say. He still has bad days, but they are fewer and farther between.
Perhaps the biggest factor motivating Frank’s improvement, however, has been the shift in how he views himself. No longer simply a madman, he is a painter and a poet, a traveler and a friend, an African and an American, a welder and a student.
And, most recently, a shaman. In February, Frank, Dick, and Frank’s mother visited Malidoma’s tribe in Burkina Faso, where Frank took part in healing rituals. He spent four weeks living in the village before returning home to Boston in early March. Dick and Malidoma are loath to disclose details of the ceremony, and say only that Frank’s response to the rituals gave them hope.
No longer simply a madman, he is a painter, a poet, a traveler, a friend and now a shaman.
The experience also shifted Dick’s perception. “I never expected to be conducting spiritual water rituals at the ocean,” he said. But that’s what he did, and, in the course of helping his son recover, he found that his own views of sickness and health had shifted. “To the extent that psychosis involves the creation of an alternate reality, the goal is to enter that world. There’s also a recognition that the world we think of as real is actually infused with aspects of the Other—that there is a mysterious impenetration or even an underlying unity.”
As for traditional medicine’s take? To the best of Dick’s knowledge, scientists haven’t studied a case exactly like Frank’s.
Susie Neilson is a science journalist.
Grapevine Center 