User:Madalibi/Shamanism and mental illness

Shamanism and schizophrenia is a debate in anthropology regarding whether shamans in some non-Western societies would be diagnosed as suffering from mental illness (especially schizophrenia) in Western societies.


 * Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo claimed that the "mental lives of savages" (including of course its religious specialists like shamans) resembled neurosis.
 * Taken on by George Devereux, the influential founder of ethnopsychiatry, which was influenced by psychoanalysis. Claimed that the trance and spirit possession of shamans were the same as schizophrenia, but were interpreted differently by the shaman's culture. Devereux implied that mentally ill people could have a role in some societies that did not interpret this kind of behavior as pathological.
 * Already criticized in the 1960s, this equivalence has now been mostly rejected. "Schizophrenia" was used vaguely or as a metaphor more than an exact diagnosis.