Week 8_Annie Tang A01

Annie Tang

A01

Week8

Among week 8’s readings, Stephanie Marohn’s “What a Shaman Sees in A Mental Hospital” impressed me the most. She discussed two exactly opposite perceptions on people in disorder. While in the western view, people in disorder are defined to have mental illness, Shamans believe them to signal “the birth of a healer”. According to the passage, in Shaman’s culture, those people who show behavior disorders are fighting to balance the energy from spirit realm alone (Marohn, 2014). Rather than being anthologized, the “insane” people are deified as the messenger from the other world. This contrast in perception reminded me of the question in professor Valverde’s lecture, “How can we think of mental illness in another way?” I used to define everything in black (negative) or white (positive). But as I grow up, I start to see things in different angles. Most of the things I perceive now are in the area of grey. People in mental illness understood in American and in Shaman is exactly the case. This is the evidence for things in grey area, which can be viewed as completely positive differentiating from another angle that is viewed as negative. The idea of this passage also reinforces my perspective of all the time, which is, we should be open-minded and embrace all kinds of possibility because what we perceived as “abnormal” are very likely due to our lack of knowledge. We do not have the power to see the entities around the patients like Shamans do. Just as the miracle in the eyes of people in medieval age are exactly the simple chemical reactions in modern time, what we viewed as mentally ill is the power and hope for Shamans.

Reference

Marohn S. (2014) “What a Shaman Sees in A Mental Hospital”. The Mind Unleashed.

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