The mysterious history of the schizophrenic and the shaman

Frank Russell coped with schizophrenia, realizing himself anew in the role of a shaman

It all starts without warning - more precisely, the symptoms are there, but you can only see them in hindsight. First, you sit in the car with your son, and then he tells you: "I can not find myself past the past." You think - well, teenagers constantly make such dramatic statements. Then he refuses to do homework, writes something about suicide on the wall with a black marker, tries to cut himself with a blade. You sit down and talk for a long time. A week later, he runs away from evening gatherings with friends, rushes home and shouts that his friends are trying to kill him. He spends his time crouching in his old mother’s room, clutching a soft toy to his chest. He is 17 years old, and you are his father, Dick Russell, a traveler, a former staff reporter for Sports Illustrated, but first of all, a father. The 21st century is coming.

Up to this point, your son Frank was a completely normal child, albeit a bit strange. An eccentric genius, badly socializing, but full of ideas - perhaps the future artist, you thought. And now you are told that the features of your son stem from pathology, his cryptic phrases are not talking about the hidden genius, but about the malfunctioning of the nervous system. You sit next to him when Frank gets a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and a bunch of different associations immediately come to your mind. In the United States, the diagnosis of schizophrenia often means a lack of housing, work, an inability to maintain close ties, and a commitment to drug use. Now your son is on the verge. You give it to doctors who prescribe antipsychotics.and when he gets up to 136 kg [Berenson, A. Eli Lilly Said to Play Down Risk of Top Pill. The New York Times (2006)], and doctors say it's normal, you believe them [Russell, D. The Astonoishing Zyprexa Cover-Up. www.MadinAmerica.com (2015)]. Regular child: Franklin Russell in childhood, before the onset of symptoms of schizophrenia.

If Frank lived somewhere else, things could go differently. In some countries, the schizophrenic employment is five times higher than in the United States. In others, symptoms of schizophrenia are considered a sign of unusual abilities.

Dick and his son for 15 years tried various methods of treatment, effective and not very. Then, suddenly, the couple went in a completely different direction, along the path that Dick now likes to call the "torch-lit passage in a long dark tunnel." By sharing his story, he hopes to help others find their way - but he realizes that sometimes it sounds crazy. For example, he believes that Frank may be a shaman.

It is believed that certain structures and parts of the brain are especially important for creating a sense of personality. One of them is located at the intersection of the work of two middle lobes of the brain; the temporal lobe, which turns everything that a person sees and hears into language, emotions and memory, and the parietal lobe, which integrates all five senses to determine location in space. This is a site called the temporal-parietal node, VTU, which collects information from these and other parts of the brain and makes a mental picture of the physical body and its location in space and time. It also plays a role in what is called a model of a person’s mental state (or theory of the mind), in the ability to recognize that your thoughts and desires are yours, and to understand that other people also have states of mind that are separate from yours.

When the work of VTU is changed or disturbed, it becomes difficult to create an idea of ​​yourself, and sometimes it is painful. It is believed that dysmorphophobiacharacterized by extreme concern with fictitious defects, arises from the malfunctioning of WTU [Feusner, JD, Yaryura-Tobias, J., & Saxena, S. The pathophysiology of body dysmorphic disorder. Body Image 5, 3-12 (2008)]. Researchers observe the atypical work of VTU in patients with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and memory loss patients.

Schizophrenia is closely related to VTU disorders. It changes the model of the mental state; schizophrenics often believe that other people are hostile to them, and when they perform tasks related to the mental state model, their WUT activity increases or decreases dramatically. Researchers evoked visions and feelings of escaping from their own bodies, experienced by individual schizophrenics, simply by stimulating WTU with electrodes. Psychiatrist Lot Postmes calls this “perceptual incoherence,” noting that a disorderly collection of sensory information destroys the ego: “normal self-perception as a single entity,“ I, ”owning and controlling thoughts, emotions, body, and actions” [Postmes, L., et al. Schizophrenia as a self-disorder due to perceptual incoherence. Schizophrenia Research 152, 41-50 (2014)].

The shattered self-consciousness of the schizophrenic makes it very difficult to present a coherent view of yourself to the world around you, and to interact with other, more holistic individuals. “Schizophrenia is a disease whose main manifestation is a decrease in the ability to socially interact,” says Matcheri Keshavan, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, an expert on schizophrenia. Yet, ironically, people with schizophrenia need other people, just like socially capable people, if not more. “The problem with people with schizophrenia is that no matter how much they want social connections, they often lose the skills they need to support them,” says Keshavan.

This need for social interactions strongly distinguishes schizophrenics from people with a diagnosis. ”Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In 2008, Bernard Crespi, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, built the theory that ASD and schizophrenia are two sides of the same coin. "Social abilities, they wrote, are underdeveloped in autism, and overdeveloped, even refusal, in psychosis (schizophrenia). ”In other words, if a person with autism feels self-defectively narrow, self-awareness of schizophrenia is impaired broad: they consider , they are many people at once, and everywhere they see motives and meaning.

And although it may be very difficult to live with them, impairment of perception can make schizophrenics more creative. Schizophrenics usually consider themselves owners of a richer imagination than the rest, and embark on more artistic projects [Kaufman, SB How Is Creativity Differentially Schizophrenia and Autism? www.Blogs.ScientificAmerican.com(2015)]. Many people with schizophrenia have said that their creative thoughts and hallucinations appear in the same place. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke refused to heal his visions, saying “don't take my devils, because angels can disappear too”. Author Stephen Mitchell, who translated many of Rilke's works, says: “He faced an existential problem, the opposite of the one that most of us have to solve: where there is a solid, albeit translucent, barrier between us and other people, there was even the thinnest separation membrane. ”

Frank Russell reported that he felt something similar. “He told me that he feels like a mirror, reflecting what is inside other people,” writes his father, Dick. "It was difficult for him to divide what belongs to him and what belongs to others." And Frank, according to Dick, is a very creative person. He draws with pencil and paint, and also enjoys welding. He invents a language from invented hieroglyphs and symbols. He composes long poems about gods and racial issues, and has won many awards for poetry in school.

Still, Frank's strange obsession with symbols, his belief that he could become Chinese or become a bear, made social interaction strange and difficult. He spent 10 years after receiving the diagnosis mostly in isolation, essentially unable to form long-term relationships or join group activities. In addition to doctors, the permanent people in the life of Frank were his parents. That was before he met Malidoma Patrice Some .


Malidoma Patrice Some considers himself a titus or shaman. He believes that belonging to a community is an essential aspect of controlling symptoms often associated with schizophrenia.

According to the World Health Organization, schizophrenia is a universal phenomenon. “So far, no community or culture of the world is free from this mysterious disease,” asserts the 1997 report. The diagnosis of schizophrenia takes into account five symptoms [according to the American DSM system / approx. transl.], as well as their influence and duration:

1. Rave;
2. Hallucinations;
3. Speech disorders;
4. Violations of behavior, up to catatonia;
5. Negative symptoms such as emotional dullness (limiting the expression of emotions), alogia (restriction of speech capabilities) and avolition (lack of initiative).

However, WHO warns that these criteria should be treated with skepticism: “modern operational diagnostic systems, being undoubtedly reliable, leave open the question of the validity of assessments in the absence of external criteria.” The diagnosis “therefore must be considered preliminary” is necessary for drawing up treatment plans, “leaving room for future changes.”

Details of the diagnosis are constantly changing. “Everything changes over time,” says Keshavan. “We are conducting research in search of the best biomarkers, but so far everything is difficult.” Robert Rosenheck, a psychiatrist at Yale University who studies the effectiveness of various treatment models for schizophrenia, goes even further in his judgments. “Usually in medicine everything is based on a disease that has a medical basis, or a psychological basis. Schizophrenia has no such thing. ”

Adding difficulties is that schizophrenia is different in different cultures [Brekke, JS, & Barrio, C. Cross-ethnic symptom differences in schizophrenia: Schizophrenia Bulletin 23, 305-316 (1997); Banerjee, A. Cross-Cultural Variance of Schizophrenia in Symptoms, Diagnosis and Treatment. Georgetown University Journal of Health Sciences 6, 18-24 (2012.)]. Several WHO studies have compared the results of schizophrenia in the United States and Western Europe with results in “developing countries” like Ghana and India. After following the patients for five years, researchers found that residents of developing countries felt "significantly better" for those who lived in "developed" countries [Foster, H. What Really Causes Schizophrenia Trafford Publishing, Bloomington, IN (2003)]. In one study, nearly 37% of patients from developing countries diagnosed with schizophrenia showed no symptoms after two years — unlike 15.5% of patients in the United States and Europe. In India, almost half of people diagnosed with schizophrenia are able to work successfully, compared with 15% of such people in the United States [Hengeveld, M. Job Hunting with Schizophrenia. The Atlantic (2015)].

Many researchers have advanced theories that such contradictory intuitions of discovery grow out of key cultural differences: collectivism or interdependence flourishes in developing countries, so people there are oriented towards life in the community [Bae, S. & Brekke, JS Characteristics of Korean-Americans with schizophrenia: A cross-ethnic comparison with African-Americans, Latinos, and Euro-Americans. Schizophrenia Bulletin 28, 703-717 (2002); Parker, CB Hallucinatory “Voices” Shaped by Local Culture, Stanford Anthropologist Says. www.news.stanford.edu. (2014)]. In developed countries, individualism predominates - autonomy and achievement through self-motivation. Other differences in developing countries can sometimes complicate this dichotomy - for example, the relatively poor availability of medicines. However, one study of “sociocentric” differences between ethnic minorities in the United States found that “certain defensive aspects of a minority ethnic culture” - namely, the prevalence of two collectivist values, empathy and social competence - “lead to milder symptoms of schizophrenia”.

“Take a young man with schizophrenia who is not able to make social contacts,” says Keshavan. “In collectivist cultures, he is still able to survive in a common family with a less successful brother or cousin ... He will feel support.” In more individualistic communities, he will feel detached and not belonging to society. Therefore, schizophrenia in individualist countries imposes serious limitations on a person. ” Individualistic communities also “reduce the motivation to recognize the presence of the disease and to seek the help of other people, be it therapists, clinics, local aid programs,” said Russell Shatt, a leading expert in the sociology of schizophrenia.

The difference in the results of the presence of the disease in different cultures can be influenced by the difference in the patients themselves. In 2012, Shihui Khan, a neuroscientist at Peking University, asked volunteers from a country with developed interdependence (China) and from a country whose residents are considered more independent (Denmark) to reflect on different people, tracking activity in their WUT. In both groups, WTU was activated when people tried to understand the thinking processes of other people — the task of the theory of mind. But the Chinese participants of VTU activated when they thought about themselves. Danes have an average prefrontal cortexwhich the researchers used to measure the degree of thinking about themselves, was activated more than the Chinese. In fact, the Chinese self-consciousness was, on average, more blurred, which directly affected the brain area, which is blamed for responsibility for the symptoms of schizophrenia.

In Khan's study, the average level of VTU activity among people from countries that promote independent behavior was closer to the level of patients with schizophrenia. Other studies, including the work of Chiyoko Kabayashky Frank from the Psychological School at Fielding University in Santa Barbara, suggest that a decrease in WTU activity in Japanese adults and children while performing tasks on the theory of mind “may be due to a reduced level of differences between the concepts of "I" and "others" in Japanese culture ”[Frank, CK & Temple, E. Cultural effects. Progress in Brain Research 178, 213-223 (2009)]. This is manifested in how people from different countries perceive the world differently: people from collectivist countries are more likely to believe in God [Cukur, C., de Guzamn, MR, & Carlo, G. Religiosity, collectivism, values, and horizontal and vertical individualism: A study of Turkey, the United States, and the Philippines. Faculty Publications, Department of Psychology University of Nebraska, Lincoln (2004)] and pay attention to the context in the images, while people from individualistic cultures are more likely to ignore the context and concentrate on the main part of the image [Liddell, BJ et al. Self-orientation modulates correlation of global and local processing. PLoS One 10, e0135453 (2015)]. It follows from this that PS must be less likely to be questioned or isolated because of their visions in collectivist cultures, and therefore, less likely to feel what the Shatt calls “socially induced stress” - which, he writes, “has biological effects,



Malidome comes from a collectivist society. He was born in the Dagar tribe in Burkina Faso, as the grandson of a famous healer; He travels the world, but settled in the USA. Malidona considers himself a bridge between his culture and the United States, existing in order to "bring the wisdom of our people into this part of the world." “Career” of Malidom - he grins at the use of this word - is a mixture of a cultural ambassador, a homeopath and a sage. He travels around the country, performing rituals and consultations, writes books and speaks. He has three master's degrees and two doctoral degrees from Brandeis University. Sometimes he calls himself a “shaman”, because people know the meaning of the word (in some way), and this is similar to his rank in Burkina Faso — tittylo, who “constantly communicates with other dimensions”.

Dick first heard of Malidom from James Hilman, a Jungian psychologist whose biography he wrote when Frank's treatment came to a standstill. Most of the time span from 20 to 30 years, Frank spent in boarding schools. His favorite was the “House of the Earth”, a private boarding school, much more structured than the previous ones. There were classes, there was an opportunity to show leadership, an atmosphere of love and care was encouraged. Frank made close friends, performed in plays. Dick was happy: for the first time since Frank fell ill, his life was filled with friends and meaning.

Thanks to these reactions (and because communities help patients remember to take medicine), such communities have become an integral part in the treatment of schizophrenia in Western medicine. In a review paper that covered 66 scientific papers, researchers from the University of Santiag in Chile found that “community-based psychological assistance significantly reduces negative and psychotic symptoms, the number of days required for hospitalization, and the frequency of drug abuse” [Armijo, J., et al . Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders: A literature review. Frontiers in Psychiatry 4 (2013). Retrieved from doi: 10.3389 / fpsyt.2013.00116]. Patients are more likely to take their medications regularly, keep their jobs and make friends. They are also less likely to be ashamed of themselves.

But Frank and Dick had a problem. The treatment at the House of the Earth cost $ 20,000 a quarter - so much Dick, who worked as a journalist all his life, could not afford to pay for a long time. After 16 months in the “House of the Earth”, conducted with the help of family and friends, he decided to stop “alienating the inevitable”. Dick took Frank back to Boston and set up a less structured boarding school, where he eventually began to pass.

Around 2012, Dick decided to look for Malido; the first time he talked to him on the phone, and then met with Ojai, a small town near Los Angeles. Then, a year later, he met him in Jamaica, taking Frank with him.

When Malidome first met Frank at dinner in Jamaica, he immediately noticed how much he looked like him. “The connection between us became clear immediately,” he says. As soon as the schizophrenic met the shaman, the latter shook his head and grabbed Frank's hands, as if they had known each other for many years. He told Dick that Frank was "like a colleague." Malidoma believes that Frank is an American version of a piece; in general, according to him, there are versions of a piece in every culture. He also believes that a person cannot decide to become a titus - this happens with a person. “Each shaman began with a crisis similar to the crisis of people who are called schizophrenics, psychotics. The path of a shaman or a man begins with breaking the spirit, he says. - At first they feel great, like everyone else.


Later, Frank found solace in self-expression through art. On the left - he plays drums in Jamaica. On the right is one of his drawings.

When this happens, Dagaras begin to collectively try to heal a broken person. One such attempt is that people dance and have fun, depicting a celebration. Malidoma recalls how he watched this process when his sister passed through it. “My sister screamed at night,” he says, “and people were playing around her.” Usually uncontrollable failures last about eight months, after which, in fact, a completely new person appears. “You need to go through a radical initiation, after which you can become a very important person, necessary for the community for its own good, you know?” If a person doesn’t have contact with the community during the breakdown, Malidoma says, he may not get better. He thinks it happened to Frank.

If Frank was born in the Dagar tribe, and experienced the same problems at 17 years old, which made him run away from his friend's apartment, Malidema said, the community would immediately rally around him and perform the same rituals that his sister underwent. After this intervention, tribal members would begin work to cure Frank and return him to the community; and when he was ready, he would occupy a prominent position. “He would become known as a spiritual person, able to look into the deepest problems of the people around him,” he says.

Malidome is not the first person to suggest a link between shamanism and schizophrenia. Psychiatrist Joseph Polimeni wrote a whole book on this topic, “Shamans Among Us” [Shamans Among Us]. In it, Polimeni noted several parallels: the shamans and schizophrenics believe that they have magical abilities, hear voices, experience feelings of leaving the body. Shamans became shamans in late adolescence or at the age of a little over 20, approximately in the same interval when schizophrenia is usually diagnosed (17-25) in men. Schizophrenics and shamans are more often men than women. The number of shamans (one in 60-150 people, the approximate size of most of the early human communities) is similar to the global number of schizophrenics (approximately 1 percent).

This theory does not support all. Critics point out that shamans enter and leave their shaman state at will, and schizophrenics have no control over their visions. But Robert Spolsky, a Stanford neuroscientist, suggested a similar hypothesis accepted by a large number of specialists: many brass leaders, shamans and prophets can demonstrate " schizotypical personality disorders. " People with such a diagnosis are often relatives of schizophrenics, and show less pronounced symptoms, such as strange speech patterns or " magical thinking " associated with creativity and high IQ. Such a description might suit Malidone, who has never experienced a serious disorder, but whose brother and sister have gone through it.

Whether or not Frank’s psychosis made him a shaman elsewhere or time, there are three main factors in the intervention of the Dagar tribe (early intervention, community and purpose) that correspond to the three factors that Keshavan, Shatt, Rosenhek and others point to as an addition to drugs. : Early Intervention [Szabo, L. Early Intervention Could Change Nature of Schizophrenia. www.USAToday.com (2014)], public support and employment. Dick may have missed a chance to hold an initiation ceremony for Dagar, but Malidom advised Dick to bring the remaining aspects of this approach into his son’s life, including rituals and other meaningful actions.

Returning from Jamaica to Boston, Frank kept in touch with Malidoma by phone. He and Dick traveled to boarding schools, clinics of various doctors practicing alternative medicine, who met Frank's nonsense with warmth and encouraged him. Dick also began to encourage his son. When Frank asked Dick to include in his memoirs, which he wrote, and his thoughts, including the idea that “melted sweat of dolphins is one of the components of beer,” Dick granted this request. These events, says Dick, instead of leading to an increase in conduct disorder, had a "landing effect." They showed Frank that he has friends and family who respect him for who he is and all that he is capable of. “If some dreams of Franklin can exist only in his imaginary world, so be it,” wrote Dick in his memoirs, “My mysterious son: the life-changing transition from schizophrenia to shamanism ”[My Mysterious Son: A Life-Changing Passage Between Schizophrenia and Shamanism]. "I learned that this is important to him."


Father and son: Today, Frank Russell is easier to cope with their symptoms. We acquired depth and his relationship with his father, who says that their journey to shamanism has changed his way of thinking about health and illness.

The results were tangible. Five years ago, before meeting with Malidoy, Frank was poorly motivated to search for social intercourse. At 37, he traveled to New Mexico and Maine, studied mechanical engineering. Today he is an extremely inventive jazz pianist. His room is filled with drawings and metal works, rich archetypal images and hieroglyphic languages ​​of his own composition.

He is not cured. He sometimes hears voices and falls into delirium. He still lives in a boarding school. But he was again able to cut the dose of medicine in half. He lost weight, and the symptoms of his diabetes are gone. He is more polite, attentive and interested in what is happening, as his father and doctors say. He still has bad days, but less and less.

Perhaps the main motivator of improving the state of Frank was a change in his attitude towards himself. He is no longer an ordinary lunatic, he is an artist and a poet, a traveler and a friend, an African and an American, a welder and a student.

And recently he also became a shaman. In February, Frank, Dick, and Frank's mother visited the Malidoma tribe in Burkina Faso, where Frank took part in healing rituals. He spent four weeks in the village before returning home to Boston in early March. Dick and Malidom do not want to share the details of the ceremony, and they only say that Frank’s reaction to the rituals gave them hope.

This experience also changed the perception of Dick. “I never thought that I would conduct spiritual rituals related to water at the ocean,” he said. But this is exactly what he did, and, helping his son recover, he discovered that his own attitude towards illness and health has changed. “If psychosis is the creation of an alternate reality, then the goal is to enter this world. There is also an understanding that the world that we consider to be real is filled with aspects of the Other - that there is a mysterious penetration or even their union. ”

And what about the approach of traditional medicine? As far as Dick is aware, scientists have not yet investigated such cases as the case of Frank.