When I was younger, I was what you might have called schizophrenic. I heard voices, and I was always frightened. Later, working on my head, both alone and in psychotherapy, I healed myself in the only way that truly works – by becoming a shaman, by entering into my so-called craziness rather than avoiding it.
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Julian Silverman in the American Anthropologist, 1967, wrote that “significant differences between acute schizophrenics and shamans are not found in the sequence of underlying psychological events that define their abnormal experiences. One major difference is emphasized – a difference in the degree of cultural acceptance of a unique resolution of a basic life crisis. In primitive cultures in which such a unique life crisis resolution is tolerated, the abnormal experience (shamanism) is typically beneficial to the individual, cognitively and affectively; he is regarded as one with expanded consciousness. In a culture that does not provide referential guides for comprehending this kind of crisis experience, the individual (schizophrenic) typically undergoes an intensification of his suffering over and above his original anxieties.”
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So, a schizophrenic is a being born with the potential to be a shaman. A shaman is a person who is at home in both the inner and the outer worlds, a spiritual source. All that needed for a schizophrenic to become a shaman is the support of his or her culture.

Acceptance by our present culture, of this sort of “unique life crisis resolution,” would allow each person who is a potential shaman the chance to achieve this expanded consciousness. Many have this potential. Yet, today, in our culture, a schizophrenic is not likely to receive any support or understanding. He or she is more likely to be locked up or given drugs.

This is a reflection of how the collective consciousness of our society is overly left-brained and rational and has repressed its other side, has called it schizophrenia. Rather than being open to this other form of consciousness, our culture has locked it out of our common consciousness and has locked it up whenever it has manifested in an individual.

Such a strategy is shortsighted and leads to mediocrity and cultural stagnation. The folks running our world remind me of King Herod, killing all this newborn potential for higher consciousness, just because they feel threatened.