Understanding Schizophrenia

In my studies I stumbled onto some incredible research. It was an anthropological study on how individuals experience schizophrenic hallucination across cultures. The mind-blowing finding may be the answer to why mental health is so poor in the west. The study showed that people with schizophrenia actually experienced different kind of hallucinations depending on what culture they came from! Patients from India for example experienced hallucinations that were often positive and involved spirituality, contacts with god and benevolent spirits while those from America tended towards violent hallucinations, where terrible things were said to them or they felt entities were coming to kill them! Wow is all I can say! The study found that the experience of those with mental illness completely differs based on the cultural context. So because the culture in India was more accepting and promotes spiritual experience, those are the kind of experiences that schizophrenics had. While here in the west, where scientism is the primary religion hallucinations are thought to be always negative, and that leads to negative experiences. How incredible is that? It is well known that ancient cultures would take those with what we would now call mental illness and train them from a young age to be shamans. To heal the community, but first to heal themselves. In the west we have the opposite approach, mental illness is a major stigma and most physicians throw pharmaceuticals at it to stop whatever experience the patient has rather than seeking to understand it.