This is one of the most enlightening articles I’ve read in awhile regarding Mental Illness… and it makes SO much sense from this point of view and what is happening around me. This enlightenment has been having me thinking that one of the things that I’ve always wanted to do is go to an indigenous culture or village and learn to become a shaman:

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.

http://thespiritscience.net/2014/06/16/what-a-shaman-sees-in-a-mental-hospital/