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johannstutt413 · 4 years

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(requested by calligomiles)

“Zimaaaa...” A voice in her ear called to her. “Ziiimaaaa...Darling, it’s time to wake up.”

“‘Darling?’ Who- Oh. Good morning.” The general woke up in Specter’s bed - not the one reserved for her in med-bay, but the one in her actual apartment.

The shark-nun smiled. “Good morning. It’s almost a shame to wake you from such a deep slumber~”

“Spending the night with you will knock anyone under,” she muttered in return. “Let’s go eat.”

“Of course~” Specter watched Zima dress closely, as if burning the motions into her mind. It had taken a little getting used to, but by this point, the Ursus was accustomed to it. After all, it wasn’t her girlfriend’s strangest quality…

At this point in their relationship - really, since the start - it was a mystery how they’d found each other. The Abyss Hunter spent more time in the psych ward than she did in the field, and the General had her business with the USSGG to attend to on top of her deployment time, but it must have been during a mission that they first met. If one pressed Zima for information (a rather stupid idea, truth be told, but fools run where angels fear to tread), she might recall the first moment she restrained the shark-nun long enough for a nearby Medic to administer a sedative, or the first night she visited her in the ward when curiosity got the better of her, or one of the many talks they’d had about things Zima was sure she’d never talked about before with anyone. Honestly, she wasn’t sure if those were what made her fall in love in the end, but even if she didn’t say it often enough...Specter had totally won her over.

It probably helped that she didn’t mind it a little rough.

As they walked to the cafeteria arm-in-arm, the shark-nun began muttering to herself. “Hmm...yes, tonight. It must be tonight. It cannot wait any longer.”

“What’s happening tonight?” Zima asked her. That shut her down quickly. “Specter?”

“I would rather not spoil the surprise, Darling. You’ll know everything tonight, I promise.”

...See, the one problem with having a girlfriend with two distinct sides to her personality: sometimes, she switched, and the general wasn’t sure if the dark side had taken over yet or not. Luckily they had a tool for this situation. “Glass house.”

“Gathers no algae.” Yeah, it uh...it didn’t have to make sense to anyone else. “You’re not happy about it?”

“I don’t like surprises...but if you don’t want to tell me, I’ll make due.”

Specter kissed her on the cheek - more of a love bite, since it was hard for her to keep all of her teeth out of the way and she had the okay from Zima not to worry too much about it. “Thank you for your patience.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She blushed in spite of herself; such is the way of the tsundere. “I hope Gummy didn’t run out of bacon early today.”

They approached the counter, ordered breakfast, and enjoyed a quiet (by cafeteria standards) meal together before going their separate ways for work that day. The general found herself coming back to that conversation again and again throughout the day, unable to stop from wondering just what Shark-Nun was up to, but training the Vanguard Operators she had seniority over and receiving it from her mentors took up enough of her brain-space that by lunch it was tightly compartmentalized for later.

“Hey, Gum, have you seen Specter today?” Zima was in line, about to order food but with a more serious question on her mind.

The cook’s smile blinked off and on for the splittest of seconds. “Um, yeah, I did earlier. She had an episode, so she’s in the ward for the night.”

“...Ah.” The general nodded to herself. “Make that a double order of pierogi, then.”

“Sure thing! Need me to tell Istina you won’t make the meeting tonight?”

She sighed. “Yeah, thanks. Why’d she pick today, of all days...”

“Well, I can’t help you there, but here’s your food!” Gummy had even gone the extra mile of putting them in two separate boxes. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I’ll be there tomorrow. Say hi to Greyy for me.”

She flashed her general a thumbs up. “Will do! Alright, who’s next?”

Once she had her meals for the evening, Zima rushed to the psych ward to find Specter, as usual in these states, bound and squirming in a straitjacket - one made specifically for her.

“Hey, babe.” She calmly walked into the room and sat at a table near the bed. “You sure know how to time these, don’t you?”

“Graaaah! Unchain me from this prison!”

The general scoffed. “Last time I did it, you tried to bite my hand off, which would’ve been kinky if you had weaker jaws. Is Specter in there right now? She told me she had a surprise for me.”

“Graaaaaooo!” She howled, bouncing up and down as she thrashed about. “Release me!!!”

“Come on, take it easy. Do you want me to bonk you?” Zima began her meal, watching her without any particular concern for her safety. After all, for all her strength, the Aegir wasn’t able to break through Rhine Labs’ handiwork.

The tantrum lasted for several hours, and yet the general remained, responding to most of her vocalizations but otherwise staying away. As it came closer to dinnertime, however, Specter regained control of herself, easily indicated by the sudden end to her thrashing and a quick glance around the room. “Where...where am I? Oh, Sonya, darling, you’re here. Good...Glass houses?”

“Gathers no algae. You missed lunch.” The general set a recently-reheated plate of food on the nightstand and helped her out of the straightjacket. “So, am I too early for the surprise?”

“The surprise...oh, darling, I’m sorry, but this recent frenzy spoiled my plans.” She collapsed into the bed, physically exhausted and mentally defeated by the realization she’d gone wild again.

The Ursus pulled on her arm. “You should eat now if you plan on sleeping through dinner.”

“Oh, yes...Thank you.” Specter sat back up, taking the container and setting it in her lap before reaching for Zima’s hand. “You’re so thoughtful.”

“...Am not.” She pouted, which earned her a soft ara-ara chuckle as her girlfriend ate. Once she was done, and the general took away the tray, Zima scooted into bed.

Shark-nun sighed. “You make confinement bearable, darling. I wanted something special for our anniversary, but I lost control at just the wrong moment...I wanted to take you somewhere special.”

“Oh, that’s why you were being all cloak-and-dagger about it.” The Ursus smiled. “I was going to get you something, too, but when Gum told me what happened, I came running instead...What a way to celebrate six months.”

“As long as you’re here...” Before she could finish the thought, Specter finally fell asleep.

Zima clicked the lights off and settled in for the night. “...there’s nothing to fear. Get a good night’s sleep, babe...love you.”

“Mmmwaa-haa-hah.” Her sleep-talk was sometimes terrifying. Other times…“And I, you~”

#arknights #zima (arknights)#specter (arknights)#...i'm kind of surprised this only took a couple hours #admittedly i fell asleep before finishing it off #but still i didn't expect this to work so well #huh...calligo knows things we don't #arknights fic

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hellzyeahwebwieldingreviews · 4 years

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Untold Tales of Spider-Man 15: The Stalking of John Doe – by Adam-Troy Castro

A pretty good story but...

“In Manhattan, stormy nights are crazy nights.” Dr. Gwendolyn Harris is “working the second half of a fifteen-hour shift at the Emergency Psychiatric Unit of the Midtown Hospital and she’d seen more business in the past three hours than she’d expected to see all day.” The cops bring in a number of crazies including “the ranting little man who’d attempted to smuggle a gun into a Rick Jones concert, in what was an apparent attempt to become the next Mark David Chapman.” (You may recall that Rick Jones, former companion to the Hulk, Captain America, and Captain Marvel, was, at one point, a big deal rock star. If you don’t recall, Adam-Troy certainly does. Mark David Chapman, of course, is the man who killed John Lennon.) Shortly before nine PM, Bill The Security Guard motions Gwen over and tells her, “Cops just called. They’re bringing in another John Doe. One they say they don’t recommend placing in the general ward.” He elaborates, “he’s totally out of his head, strong as a moose, and…it took more than a dozen cops working tag-teams to wrestle him into a pair of straitjackets.”The police bring in the John Doe, “a wiry Caucasian male in his twenties, with short-cropped brown hair and eyes that could have been inviting were they not crazed…wearing nothing but a sodden pair of blue tights,” and it takes five of them to contain him.

Suddenly, the John Doe goes berserk, yelling, “He’s after me, he’ll track me down, it’s what he does, it’s what he knows, he’ll find my trail and get me,” and the cops are about to lose control of him when Gwen steps in to calm her patient down. The John Doe looks at her and calls her “Gwendy,” which takes Gwen by surprise. However, when he says, “You can’t be Gwendy. The Goblin killed Gwendy. I saw him kill Gwendy,” she knows he isn’t referring to her. Finally “John” tells her, “the Hunter, that dart he shot me with, it’s some kind of rare psychoactive snake venom derivative, making all the nightmares come back, I’m f-fighting it but…I can’t seem to focus my thoughts…is it really you, Gwendy? Please tell me it’s really you.” Gwen lies, saying, “It’s me,” and the John Doe kisses her wrist and begins to cry.After “John” is strapped on a bed in a “padded isolation cell,” police Sergeant Monaghan tells Gwen that her patient was rambling on about “lizards, vultures, tarantulas, pumas, cobras, rhinos, black cats, octopuses.”

He reports that the “psycho came out of that alley stripped to the waist, wired like all the crackheads you ever saw, screaming about the monsters. Attacked a whole bunch of folks lined up at the Cineplex, calling ‘em murderers and villains, tossing ‘em side to side like it was bowling night or something. Even jumped a poor far guy, calling him the Kingpin. When Stanley and I showed up, he almost tore us to pieces.” Stanley, one of the other cops, disagrees, saying, “He’s hallucinating, sure, and from the way he goes on, he sees enemies everywhere he looks, but even with his strength, even in a state of panic, he’s managed to resist doing anybody any serious harm…For what it’s worth, I think he’s telling the truth. I think he was dosed with something.”

The cops leave and Gwen prepares to examine her patient but she asks Gordy and Flack, two beefy security guards, to stand by.She finds John Doe muttering about Mary Jane, monsters, Felicia and the Hunter.” “[T]here was something about the way John Doe presented it, something about the conviction behind his words, that hit all three of them (Gwen, Gordy, Flack) at the base of the spine.” “John” again recognizes Dr. Harris as “Gwendy” and she tells him she needs to take a blood sample. “I wouldn’t even be in this mess if not for my blood!” he says, “That spider, messing up my life – take it all, why don’t you?...Call Morbius and have yourselves a kegger!” She takes the blood and his vital signs. He starts to tell her his name but changes his mind. When Flack tells him he’s safe from the Hunter, “John” laughs, “You don’t know what he is. He’s coming. And you won’t even slow him down.” Gwen takes the blood sample to Willie the lab tech to be analyzed for “alcohol, crack, PCP, all the other usual psychoactive agents – and one other thing. Snake venom.”As the night goes on, the weather gets nastier with destructive winds and flooding. Gwen is overwhelmed by psych cases entering the emergency room even as “the cops were besieged by screwball reports of a half-man, half-lion spotted on the rooftops.”

At last she gets the lab report on “John’s” blood. Negative for everything except snake venom. But also, Willie adds, “positive for another factor, that had screwed up all the tests until he compensated for it; a factor that was like nothing else he’d ever seen.” The blood is also “superoxygenated.” Gwen returns to the padded cell and finds “John” sitting up on the bed, having gotten out of his restraints. Instinctively, she enters without Gordy and Flack. She finds “John” more coherent but still crazed. He recognizes that she isn’t his Gwendy but also rambles on about the hunter, revealing that he was jumped and dosed and then fled to an alley where he removed his mask. Howling, “Oh, my God! My face! My face! You can see my face!” he covers it with his hands. Gwen tells him, “I don’t care who you are…I don’t care what you look like. I just want to help you.” Realizing, “the Hunter’s coming,” “John” gets up and opens the locked reinforced door “with one annoyed tug,” taking a “fairly large piece of wall” with it. He runs smack into Gordy and Flack but they are unable to stop him. Unexpectedly, however, “John” turns rather than flees, and “made an odd gesture with both hands: hands out, middle two fingers of each curled inward to tap the palm…He seemed genuinely astonished when nothing happened.”

This allows Gordy and Flack to tackle him. A third orderly joins them. “John” is still on the verge of getting away when Gwen yells “Stop!” and he does. Again warning her that “the Hunter’s coming,” he faints.This time, they restrain “John” with every device that they have. Gordy and Flack stand guard duty outside. Gwen worries that “John” may be speaking the truth. She knows, “if it weren’t possible to get reasonable people to believe the rantings of the insane, then a fair percentage of cult leaders and politicians would have been out of work.” But even knowing that, “she couldn’t stop thinking about the Hunter.” Later, she asks the lab tech if the John Doe could be “a paranormal.” “You mean like the Thing?” he says, “Or Captain America? Or one of those guys?” then follows with, “If he was a mutant…you’d need DNA tests for a definitive diagnosis If he was paranormal in some other nonphysical way, there’s usually not much you can do to tell.” This conversation is interrupted when Bill the Security Guard tells them, “Some crazy off the street” has entered the hospital. “Tall, muscular guy, Russian accent, wearing leopard-skin tights and a skinned lion’s head for a vest, if you can believe that…He said he was the hunter and said he’d go wherever he chose to go.

The cops who tried to detain him for questioning are now being worked on in the emergency room. So’s some poor guy in the elevator who gave him a lecture about the evils of wearing fur.” Gwen knows the Hunter has arrived. She has Bill barricade the door to the Psych Unit and tells him to prepare to shoot anyone who enters. From his cell, the John Doe starts screaming and pounding on the door, without anyone telling him about the oncoming danger. Gwen sends Gordy and Flack to help Bill. Then she hears “John” ripping the padding off the walls, in order to eliminate its blow-suffusing effects. Gwen, who knows “John” is her only hope, wishes they hadn’t assisted in weakening him. Soon after, “John” tears the door away and, weak and feverish, he confronts Gwen. He tells her he needs gauze to conceal his face from the Hunter. “His eyes were wide, pleading…and sane.” Gwen acts without hesitation, helping him to the supply room where she wraps his head. Then the Hunter arrives.“John” goes out to face him and Gwen follows soon after.

There she experiences the full force and power of the Hunter. “It would have been impossible for any living thing to look at this man and not consider itself his natural prey.” She notices that Bill, Gordy, and Flack have already been disposed of and she sees “John” “facing the Hunter in a position midway between a crouch and the confrontational stance of a boxer.” The Hunter carries “curved jaguar tusks…both dripping with something black and foul.” He lunges forward at “John” and the battle continues, their movements impossibly fast. “Then they sped up, moving with such superhuman speed that Dr. Harris found herself unable to follow it all.” After a protracted battle, the Hunter gets “John” into position for a killing blow. But Gordy “charged across the room and piled into the Hunter with every ounce of his three hundred pound musculature. Gordy had been a star quarterback in college. He’d almost made it to the pros. He didn’t even budge the Hunter.” But he does distract the Hunter long enough for “John” to disappear.Gwen feels herself lifted off the ground, “up near the ceiling…and she found herself flying back down the corridor.” She soon realizes that “John” is carrying her as he runs along the ceiling. “John” tosses her into the storage room. She sees the Hunter pass by the room and hears him catch up with “John.” She can tell that “John” has lost.

She grabs some items from the supply room and follows, only to find the Hunter “holding John Doe off the floor by his neck.” Since “one of the first things she’d ever learned was that with great power comes great responsibility,” Gwen plunges two hypos full of Thorazine into the Hunter’s neck. The Hunter knocks her across the room and growls, “Stupid woman! When I’m done with him, I’ll break..your…neck!” “John,” who still thinks of Gwen on some level as his Gwendy reacts to this. “No! Not again!” he yells and becomes an “engine of destruction.” “A new expression entered the Hunter’s eyes. Helplessness. Terror.” And eventually, the Hunter flees. “John” stops to ask Gwen if she is all right, then he follows the Hunter.In the aftermath, Gwen asks for and gets the day shift. “The fingerprints and photographs taken of the perpetrator known as John Doe quickly disappeared from the filing room at the precinct house where he’d been booked – a locked room three stories up, with a single window that did not happen to be equipped with a fire escape.” Two weeks later, Gwen finds a dozen red roses in a vase on her desk with a note taped to it.

The note reads in part, “It was one of the worst nights of my life, which is saying a lot. I’ve had some bad ones, Doctor; you’ll never know how bad. But this was one of the worst. And you were there for me. You kept me hanging on even when there was nothing to hang on to. And though part of it was your accidental resemblance to a friend long dead and gone, even that wouldn’t have been enough if not for your strength, your courage, and your compassion…Thank you.” Gwen sniffs the flowers and a spider moves from the vase to the back of her hand. “As she studied it, the little thing froze in indecision, unsure which way to run. Tsking with sympathy, she took it to a window and set it free.”

If taken wholly in isolation this wouldn’t be all that terrible. it sort o combines two typical types of super hero stories.

a) the ‘everything you believe has been a product of delusion’

And

b) the hero is locked up in an asylum

In the ways the story works it works due to ‘Gwen’ being the POV character.

But that’s also it’s weakness. I find it a little difficult to believe that a NYC resident like Dr. Harris would honestly not deduce that ‘John Doe’ is Spider-Man. Part of that is her and the other staff dismissing ‘John’ mentioning his rogue’s gallery. Surely the Goblin’s implication in Gwen’s death and ‘John’s super human strength would be enough to put two and two together.

Additionally ending the anthology with a focus upon a random new character we will never see again is kind of...well lame. In theory this could have worked as a third party observer might’ve put some grander perspective upon who Spider-Man is and what he represents.

But since Peter isn’t exactly ‘sober’ in this story it winds up being about Gwen’s gradual discovery of who her patient really is.

And it executes that well but I’m just questioning the point of it. I suppose it makes for a nice full stop for the anthology because it manages to be touches upon Spidey’s broader history. But then again...there is a particular emphasis upon Gwen.*

Again in isolation this sort of makes sense (though much moreso if this was set shortly after her death) but within the context of the anthology it’s retreading old ground. And ground trodden better before I might add (Deadly Force utilized Gwen’s death far more effectively).

Perhaps the most egregious point about the story is that it’s placed in a weird place in the book. The entire anthology is intended to move along Spidey’s timeline but this story must obviously be set before Kraven’s Last Hunt and yet the prior story must’ve been set way later than that. Essentially this should’ve been the penultimate story and the prior yarn the actual final one.

But I suspect the editors recognized that this was the much stronger story and ultimately a more fitting tale to end the anthology on.

Other than that I have little to say about this story beyond

a) The narrator finally delivered a decent performance as Spider-Man, chiefly because Peter wasn’t in his right mind and therefore wouldn’t sound himself anyway.

b) Kraven was done pretty well, in that he was scary and intimidating.

c) Maybe this story prompted Castro’s eventual Sinister Six trilogy

d) For a story called ‘Untold Tales of Spider-Man’ this story doesn’t really take advantage of the concept. This story could’ve happened at almost any time after Peter had met Felicia and before Kraven’s death and it doesn’t really explore anything new. Even the prior story had Jonah react to Alstair’s Smythe’s new body and saw him teaming up with Gargan.

Over all...it’s not a BAD story by any means but I think there are much stronger entries.

As for the anthology as a whole, it’s a mixed bag but that’s to be expected. Anthologies are rarely anything but mixed bags.

But as anthologies go I have to admit this one was superior to Ultimate Spider-Man, albeit none of the stories in this book top the best material from the USM anthology.

*That makes 3 and a half stories that emphasis Gwen and like half a story that emphasises MJ. That kinda sucks.

#Adam-Troy Castro #spider-man #Untold Tales Of Spider-Man #Peter Parker #Gwen Stacy #Kraven the Hunter #sergei kravinoff

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theomegapointacademyblog · 3 years

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What a Shaman Sees in A Mental Hospital

Stephanie Marohn with Malidoma Patrice Somé

By WakingTimes August 22, 2014

https://umaincertaantropologia.org/2016/03/08/what-a-shaman-sees-in-a-mental-hospital-waking-times/

The Shamanic View of Mental Illness

In the shamanic view, mental illness signals “the birth of a healer,” explains Malidoma Patrice Somé. Thus, mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, spiritual crises, and need to be regarded as such to aid the healer in being born.

What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm. “Mental disorder, behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field,” says Dr. Somé. These disturbances result when the person does not get assistance in dealing with the presence of the energy from the spirit realm.

One of the things Dr. Somé encountered when he first came to the United States in 1980 for graduate study was how this country deals with mental illness. When a fellow student was sent to a mental institute due to “nervous depression,” Dr. Somé went to visit him.

“I was so shocked. That was the first time I was brought face to face with what is done here to people exhibiting the same symptoms I’ve seen in my village.” What struck Dr. Somé was that the attention given to such symptoms was based on pathology, on the idea that the condition is something that needs to stop. This was in complete opposition to the way his culture views such a situation. As he looked around the stark ward at the patients, some in straitjackets, some zoned out on medications, others screaming, he observed to himself, “So this is how the healers who are attempting to be born are treated in this culture. What a loss! What a loss that a person who is finally being aligned with a power from the other world is just being wasted.”

Another way to say this, which may make more sense to the Western mind, is that we in the West are not trained in how to deal or even taught to acknowledge the existence of psychic phenomena, the spiritual world. In fact, psychic abilities are denigrated. When energies from the spiritual world emerge in a Western psyche, that individual is completely unequipped to integrate them or even recognize what is happening. The result can be terrifying. Without the proper context for and assistance in dealing with the breakthrough from another level of reality, for all practical purposes, the person is insane. Heavy dosing with anti-psychotic drugs compounds the problem and prevents the integration that could lead to soul development and growth in the individual who has received these energies.

On the mental ward, Dr Somé saw a lot of “beings” hanging around the patients, “entities” that are invisible to most people but that shamans and psychics are able to see. “They were causing the crisis in these people,” he says. It appeared to him that these beings were trying to get the medications and their effects out of the bodies of the people the beings were trying to merge with, and were increasing the patients’ pain in the process. “The beings were acting almost like some kind of excavator in the energy field of people. They were really fierce about that. The people they were doing that to were just screaming and yelling,” he said. He couldn’t stay in that environment and had to leave.

In the Dagara tradition, the community helps the person reconcile the energies of both worlds–”the world of the spirit that he or she is merged with, and the village and community.” That person is able then to serve as a bridge between the worlds and help the living with information and healing they need. Thus, the spiritual crisis ends with the birth of another healer. “The other world’s relationship with our world is one of sponsorship,” Dr. Somé explains. “More often than not, the knowledge and skills that arise from this kind of merger are a knowledge or a skill that is provided directly from the other world.”

The beings who were increasing the pain of the inmates on the mental hospital ward were actually attempting to merge with the inmates in order to get messages through to this world. The people they had chosen to merge with were getting no assistance in learning how to be a bridge between the worlds and the beings’ attempts to merge were thwarted. The result was the sustaining of the initial disorder of energy and the aborting of the birth of a healer.

“The Western culture has consistently ignored the birth of the healer,” states Dr. Somé. “Consequently, there will be a tendency from the other world to keep trying as many people as possible in an attempt to get somebody’s attention. They have to try harder.” The spirits are drawn to people whose senses have not been anesthetized. “The sensitivity is pretty much read as an invitation to come in,” he notes.

Those who develop so-called mental disorders are those who are sensitive, which is viewed in Western culture as oversensitivity. Indigenous cultures don’t see it that way and, as a result, sensitive people don’t experience themselves as overly sensitive. In the West, “it is the overload of the culture they’re in that is just wrecking them,” observes Dr. Somé. The frenetic pace, the bombardment of the senses, and the violent energy that characterize Western culture can overwhelm sensitive people.

Schizophrenia and Foreign Energy

With schizophrenia, there is a special “receptivity to a flow of images and information, which cannot be controlled,” stated Dr. Somé. “When this kind of rush occurs at a time that is not personally chosen, and particularly when it comes with images that are scary and contradictory, the person goes into a frenzy.”

What is required in this situation is first to separate the person’s energy from the extraneous foreign energies, by using shamanic practice (what is known as a “sweep”) to clear the latter out of the individual’s aura. With the clearing of their energy field, the person no longer picks up a flood of information and so no longer has a reason to be scared and disturbed, explains Dr. Somé.

Then it is possible to help the person align with the energy of the spirit being attempting to come through from the other world and give birth to the healer. The blockage of that emergence is what creates problems. “The energy of the healer is a high-voltage energy,” he observes. “When it is blocked, it just burns up the person. It’s like a short-circuit. Fuses are blowing. This is why it can be really scary, and I understand why this culture prefers to confine these people. Here they are yelling and screaming, and they’re put into a straitjacket. That’s a sad image.” Again, the shamanic approach is to work on aligning the energies so there is no blockage, “fuses” aren’t blowing, and the person can become the healer they are meant to be.

It needs to be noted at this point, however, that not all of the spirit beings that enter a person’s energetic field are there for the purposes of promoting healing. There are negative energies as well, which are undesirable presences in the aura. In those cases, the shamanic approach is to remove them from the aura, rather than work to align the discordant energies

Alex: Crazy in the USA, Healer in Africa

To test his belief that the shamanic view of mental illness holds true in the Western world as well as in indigenous cultures, Dr. Somé took a mental patient back to Africa with him, to his village. “I was prompted by my own curiosity to find out whether there’s truth in the universality that mental illness could be connected with an alignment with a being from another world,” says Dr. Somé.

Alex was an 18-year-old American who had suffered a psychotic break when he was 14. He had hallucinations, was suicidal, and went through cycles of dangerously severe depression. He was in a mental hospital and had been given a lot of drugs, but nothing was helping. “The parents had done everything–unsuccessfully,” says Dr. Somé. “They didn’t know what else to do.”

With their permission, Dr. Somé took their son to Africa. “After eight months there, Alex had become quite normal, Dr. Somé reports. He was even able to participate with healers in the business of healing; sitting with them all day long and helping them, assisting them in what they were doing with their clients . . . . He spent about four years in my village.” Alex stayed by choice, not because he needed more healing. He felt, “much safer in the village than in America.”

To bring his energy and that of the being from the spiritual realm into alignment, Alex went through a shamanic ritual designed for that purpose, although it was slightly different from the one used with the Dagara people. “He wasn’t born in the village, so something else applied. But the result was similar, even though the ritual was not literally the same,” explains Dr. Somé. The fact that aligning the energy worked to heal Alex demonstrated to Dr. Somé that the connection between other beings and mental illness is indeed universal.

After the ritual, Alex began to share the messages that the spirit being had for this world. Unfortunately, the people he was talking to didn’t speak English (Dr. Somé was away at that point). The whole experience led, however, to Alex’s going to college to study psychology. He returned to the United States after four years because “he discovered that all the things that he needed to do had been done, and he could then move on with his life.”

The last that Dr. Somé heard was that Alex was in graduate school in psychology at Harvard. No one had thought he would ever be able to complete undergraduate studies, much less get an advanced degree.

Dr. Somé sums up what Alex’s mental illness was all about: “He was reaching out. It was an emergency call. His job and his purpose was to be a healer. He said no one was paying attention to that.”

After seeing how well the shamanic approach worked for Alex, Dr. Somé concluded that spirit beings are just as much an issue in the West as in his community in Africa. “Yet the question still remains, the answer to this problem must be found here, instead of having to go all the way overseas to seek the answer. There has to be a way in which a little bit of attention beyond the pathology of this whole experience leads to the possibility of coming up with the proper ritual to help people.

Longing for Spiritual Connection

A common thread that Dr. Somé has noticed in “mental” disorders in the West is “a very ancient ancestral energy that has been placed in stasis, that finally is coming out in the person.” His job then is to trace it back, to go back in time to discover what that spirit is. In most cases, the spirit is connected to nature, especially with mountains or big rivers, he says.

In the case of mountains, as an example to explain the phenomenon, “it’s a spirit of the mountain that is walking side by side with the person and, as a result, creating a time-space distortion that is affecting the person caught in it.” What is needed is a merger or alignment of the two energies, “so the person and the mountain spirit become one.” Again, the shaman conducts a specific ritual to bring about this alignment.

Dr. Somé believes that he encounters this situation so often in the United States because “most of the fabric of this country is made up of the energy of the machine, and the result of that is the disconnection and the severing of the past. You can run from the past, but you can’t hide from it.” The ancestral spirit of the natural world comes visiting. “It’s not so much what the spirit wants as it is what the person wants,” he says. “The spirit sees in us a call for something grand, something that will make life meaningful, and so the spirit is responding to that.”

That call, which we don’t even know we are making, reflects “a strong longing for a profound connection, a connection that transcends materialism and possession of things and moves into a tangible cosmic dimension. Most of this longing is unconscious, but for spirits, conscious or unconscious doesn’t make any difference.” They respond to either.

As part of the ritual to merge the mountain and human energy, those who are receiving the “mountain energy” are sent to a mountain area of their choice, where they pick up a stone that calls to them. They bring that stone back for the rest of the ritual and then keep it as a companion; some even carry it around with them. “The presence of the stone does a lot in tuning the perceptive ability of the person,” notes Dr. Somé. “They receive all kinds of information that they can make use of, so it’s like they get some tangible guidance from the other world as to how to live their life.”

When it is the “river energy,” those being called go to the river and, after speaking to the river spirit, find a water stone to bring back for the same kind of ritual as with the mountain spirit.

“People think something extraordinary must be done in an extraordinary situation like this,” he says. That’s not usually the case. Sometimes it is as simple as carrying a stone.

A Sacred Ritual Approach to Mental Illness

One of the gifts a shaman can bring to the Western world is to help people rediscover ritual, which is so sadly lacking. “The abandonment of ritual can be devastating. From the spiritual view, ritual is inevitable and necessary if one is to live,” Dr. Somé writes in Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community. “To say that ritual is needed in the industrialized world is an understatement. We have seen in my own people that it is probably impossible to live a sane life without it.”

Dr. Somé did not feel that the rituals from his traditional village could simply be transferred to the West, so over his years of shamanic work here, he has designed rituals that meet the very different needs of this culture. Although the rituals change according to the individual or the group involved, he finds that there is a need for certain rituals in general.

One of these involves helping people discover that their distress is coming from the fact that they are “called by beings from the other world to cooperate with them in doing healing work.” Ritual allows them to move out of the distress and accept that calling.

Another ritual need relates to initiation. In indigenous cultures all over the world, young people are initiated into adulthood when they reach a certain age. The lack of such initiation in the West is part of the crisis that people are in here, says Dr. Somé. He urges communities to bring together “the creative juices of people who have had this kind of experience, in an attempt to come up with some kind of an alternative ritual that would at least begin to put a dent in this kind of crisis.”

Another ritual that repeatedly speaks to the needs of those coming to him for help entails making a bonfire, and then putting into the bonfire “items that are symbolic of issues carried inside the individuals . . . It might be the issues of anger and frustration against an ancestor who has left a legacy of murder and enslavement or anything, things that the descendant has to live with,” he explains. “If these are approached as things that are blocking the human imagination, the person’s life purpose, and even the person’s view of life as something that can improve, then it makes sense to begin thinking in terms of how to turn that blockage into a roadway that can lead to something more creative and more fulfilling.”

The example of issues with an ancestors touches on rituals designed by Dr. Somé that address a serious dysfunction in Western society and in the process “trigger enlightenment” in participants. These are ancestral rituals, and the dysfunction they are aimed at is the mass turning-of-the-back on ancestors. Some of the spirits trying to come through, as described earlier, may be “ancestors who want to merge with a descendant in an attempt to heal what they weren’t able to do while in their physical body.”

“Unless the relationship between the living and the dead is in balance, chaos ensues,” he says. “The Dagara believe that, if such an imbalance exists, it is the duty of the living to heal their ancestors. If these ancestors are not healed, their sick energy will haunt the souls and psyches of those who are responsible for helping them.” The rituals focus on healing the relationship with our ancestors, both specific issues of an individual ancestor and the larger cultural issues contained in our past. Dr. Somé has seen extraordinary healing occur at these rituals.

Taking a sacred ritual approach to mental illness rather than regarding the person as a pathological case gives the person affected–and indeed the community at large–the opportunity to begin looking at it from that vantage point too, which leads to “a whole plethora of opportunities and ritual initiative that can be very, very beneficial to everyone present,” states. Dr. Somé.

Excerpted from: The Natural Medicine Guide to Schizophrenia, or The Natural Medicine Guide to Bi-polar Disorder, pages 178-189, Stephanie Marohn (featuring Malidoma Patrice Somé).

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bordapanic · 6 years

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Crazy Little Thing Called Love (2/?)

Words: 1,600~ || CW: None yet || During his third year of college, Ford meets someone called Bill. Things progress dangerously and quickly after that. (Billford fic) || CH 1 | CH 2 | CH 3

Note: All The Chemical Talk Is Far From Factual And Was Excessively Made Up.

Ford would be lying if he had said he hadn’t gotten nervous when his professor arranged for another psych ward visit. Frankly, the class was... he didn’t want to quite say boring, but compared to his other classes it wasn’t as interesting to him. His curiosity sparked up whenever the more neurological mechanisms came up in lecture, but so far that had rarely happened.

That being said, the last ward visit had been the most interesting thing to happen in this class. However, thinking that he may potentially see Bill again had him nervous. It’d be rude to pretend not to notice him, but at the same time he was nervous what another conversation with him would yield. Or rather how he was even suppose to act, really.

It wasn’t as though he was a classmate, after all. Or even just someone he saw regularly on the bus. Whatever the social etiquette for this entailed, Ford didn’t know what it was and he was far from asking anyone about it. Just trying to explain the ‘situation’ itself, if he could even really call it that, felt ridiculous with how he had spent virtually less than a few minutes talking to Bill.

It’d perhaps be easier, if he knew he indefinitely wasn’t going to be at the ward again. Considering how early it was into the semester though, he seriously doubted that.

As it stood, he couldn’t find it in himself to walk by and pretend to completely miss the man. If he did, he’d have to do that for all future trips, and he didn’t think he could even manage it once if he was being honest with himself. Additionally, Bill had told him to come back around, so it almost felt rude to purposefully avoid him.

Which, in retrospect, the casual request was a bit odd. Really everything about the man had been a bit odd, though that probably shouldn’t be surprising considering where he was at.

Ford couldn’t help getting increasingly antsy once they’d gone into the hallway. The professor encouraged them to glance through the different case files that had been set beside the doors now.

He stayed in the middle of the hall for a few spare seconds before taking a breath and heading towards Bill’s cells. His anxieties were quickly dropped though as he noticed Bill in a straitjacket and several injuries on his face, the injuries looking worse the closer he got. There were a few cuts, but the worst offender was the bruised and swelling skin near his eye. “Are- Are you okay?”

Bill was sitting down on the floor beside the wall, close enough to the glass that it wasn’t too far away to properly talk. He gave him a lopsided grin as he noticed him. “Depends on which definition, you want to take there, huh.” He replied cheerfully.

Ford didn’t quite understand but reworded the question regardless, gesturing to his face. “I mean... I mean, did something happen?”

“Ha! ‘Did something happen?’ Let’s just say the service here is absolutely dreadful. Plus, the living arrangements don’t quite come up to standards for ‘human living.’” Bill said casually.

Ford admittedly hadn’t paid much attention to this place. He glanced past Bill into his room. It... certainly didn’t look pleasant. It took him a moment to fully realize the implication of what Bill was saying though. He looked back to Bill, again taking in the rough injuries on his face. “The guards...?”

“Yup. I’m not giving this place a five star review anytime soon.” Bill said, confirming his suspicions. Then as though it was a perfectly natural time to segway from the topic, he simply said. “Engineering.”

He understood the abrupt subject change, though it didn’t make it any more unexpected. He pushed down questions that he hadn’t even had a chance to voice. When had they attacked him? What prompted it? Was the straitjacket part of that or entirely unrelated? “Yes. Mechanical Engineering.”

His eyes lit up at that, and he whistled. “I knew you were just too smart to not be in engineering. I was more into chemicals myself.”

“You’re familiar with Chemistry?” He didn’t have any real reason to be surprised, he supposed, but he still was.

“Oh! That’s putting it lightly, pal. I bonded together several different polymers for my own use. Get the right components together and you can make yourself a pretty little gas that melts anything.”

“How?” He had heard of some chemicals that could melt metal down, but not necessarily anything in a gaseous form.

“Well you need iodine. Put it with the right stuff and it has this neat habit of getting in between the cells and corroding it right away! Don’t want to breath that stuff in, believe me.” He explained.

“It is a caustic agent.” He barked out half a laugh, less out of any actual humor and more out of the grim imagery catching him off guard. Iodine on its own was already bad enough.

Bill hummed. “Another major of yours, huh?”

“Ha... Is that another guess?”

“Are they really guesses if I already know.” Bill answered with a smile.

Ford half smiles at that. “I really didn’t say much.”

"You had this look on your face though. You had an idea what I was talking about, thinking through something even.” He shifted his back against the wall. “What were you trying to figure out?”

“The oxide blend that would bond with the iodine without making it lose its properties.” Ford answered honestly.

“An oxide, huh?” He said smugly.

It wasn’t an oxide...? “That’d be the best combination for covalent bonding though.”

“I never said this didn’t take some extra measures to make.” Bill said. “Try thinking along the lines of something less dense-”

“A nitrous blend.” He realized.

Bill blinked, really watching him now.

Ford barely noticed though, continuing almost to himself. “It allows for the iodine cells to separate enough to affect foreign cells while still maintaining the compound.” He reasoned, gaze drifting off as he thought. “It’d take a powerful depressurizer, but it could work.” A short laugh from Bill managed to get him to look back at him again.

“That’s right.” His eyes sparked brightly, sitting up from the wall. “Pick the wrong blend though and it’ll combust entirely! Good luck with trial and error here.”

“That’s amazing.” The precision it’d take to create the blend had to be flawless.

“You should see it when it’s working.” Bill said, looking off into the hallway. “Now that’s when everyone can see how amazing it is!” He seemed to get distracted, his eye catching on the various students in the hallway for a short while.

“You know,” he started, looking back at Ford again, not bothering to reign his smile back. “You’re a real genius in the making, aren’t you?” The way Bill said it though it was no question. “Something special.”

A feeling bubbled up high in Ford’s chest and he laughed lightly. He couldn’t bring himself to deny the claim, even if it was a bit generous for knowing a little Chemistry. He had said ‘in the making’ though, and that could easily turn out to be true. “I suppose that depends on how I do in the future.”

Bill cocked his head. “Oh, it’s pretty obvious how you’re going to do in the future. You’re already surpassing all your peers.” He said, tilting his head to indicate the other students. “Three majors is already up there, and you’re already going past even that, smart guy.”

“Thank you...” A smile stretched across his face. Subpar university or not... well reasonably, his success in pursuing his majors thus far still must have meant something, right?

Bill slowly smiled, which was a tad confusing, though Ford didn’t have long to really think on it. “You know,” he started, “I bet you could even figure out the iodine compound.”

“I-” Well, on the surface it didn’t seem terribly difficult, but there had to be more to it though, of course. His mind already started on some possibilities before he thought of something. “Wait. Wait, you don’t mean actually making it, do you?”

“Oh, I’m sure you could do that too, but I just meant figuring out what goes in it exactly!” He continued. “It’s my own little concoction, nothing you could just pick out of a textbook. Actual problem solving, you know. You get three chances and I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

He was about to ask how many chemicals were involved, but then the professor started distantly calling for the class to regroup. Ford frowned, seeing other students starting to making their way back up the hall. He glanced back to Bill though to at least ask him one thing. “ What about hints?”

“Do you need any?” Bill asked him right back, an outright challenge.

Ford paused for half a second, then purposefully turned to rejoin his class in a silent answer to the question.

No, he didn’t. He already knew the compound was composed of iodine and a nitrous blend. The rest he could figure out.

Regardless of getting to the ground before even most of the other students, his professor still gave him an odd look. “Were you just talking to a patient?”

“Uh, well- yes.” His mind had already been half buried with possible additional chemicals for the compound. “Didn’t we stop in this room to learn about the patients though?” He frankly hadn’t been paying very much attention due to his prior worry, but that had to be the point in this.

“Yes, but-” The professor took a breath, glancing beyond him for a brief moment. He sighed. “I meant to just look at their files, it has plenty of information in it. Just- You just need to be careful doing something like that here. They’re here for a reason. Please, make sure to exercise a little caution.”

“Of course, I will.” He promised. “I already am, Professor.” It’s not like he was unlocking the glass door or anything, after all.

Nothing could be farther from dangerous than just simple conversation.

#billford #billford au #gf fic #gf au fic #human bill au #/the beginnings of bill hooking in ford/#professor: pLEASE be careful #ford: i will; i promise!#*Sudden Narrator Voice* He would in fact not be careful #btw yeah no - ya just gotta roll with me on the chemicals here #this is STRAIGHT UP not a fic i'm gonna research more than 20 minutes for per chapter #again - super self indulgent fic so inaccuracies and assumptions are gonna be here #my fics #mine

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cvioleta · 7 years

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Everything She Wants, Part 7

Harleen stood at the door of Dr. Arkham’s office until he noticed she was there. His face lit up immediately. She had waited until the morning to have this conversation because she was just too angry about the news yesterday. ECT? What’s next, lobotomies? Were they running a medical facility here or a concentration camp? The more she thought about it, the angrier she got, especially with the fact that this information wasn’t in his chart. She knew he wasn’t lying though; she had looked for the burn marks before he left and they were there.

“Harleen, come on in, sit down.” She closed the door behind her and seated herself in one of the chairs facing his desk. “I reviewed your report from your session with the Joker yesterday and called Captain Billings at the Gotham City P.D. He thinks the information you obtained will put to rest at least three murders in his cold case file. They’re ready to give you a commendation!”

She smiled, telling herself this was most definitely a situation where she needed to play sweet, cute Dr. Quinzel instead of the one that wanted to pick up the paperweight at the edge of his desk and brain him with it. “I’m glad you’re happy with my work. But I do have a serious concern to discuss with you.”

Arkham beamed. “Indeed you do. We’re overdue on your six month review, aren’t we? And I don’t think I’ll have any trouble getting you bumped up several pay grades with your recent accomplishments. You know, when I hired you, there were people that thought you wouldn’t be able to do the job. I enjoy that you’ve proven them wrong.”

Yes, she thought. Psych Ward Barbie, how could I forget? And was there a real need to remind me or are you just making sure I’m good and grateful and trying to redirect the conversation because you know what I’m in here about?

“Dr. Arkham, I wasn’t aware we were still using electroconvulsive therapy here, much less that we were using it on patients without their consent. Is that why it’s not being noted in the charts or disclosed to the treating doctor?”

He was startled and then decided to flatter her. “I’m not surprised you picked up on that, Harleen. Your attention to detail was one reason I hired you.” Arkham cleared his throat and continued. “You know that this is not a typical psychiatric institution. We have patients here who are capable of unspeakable acts of violence, and have proven that again and again. Some are metahumans with superior strength and abilities. We cannot keep the public or ourselves safe, or help them, if we can’t keep them under control.”

Wonder how many times he has recited that memorized speech? “That’s why we have straitjackets, masks and psychopharmacologicals. All legal, and with no long term harm to the patient.”

Arkham chuckled. “If you’re worried about legalities, I assure you both the Gotham City P.D. and the Gotham Medical Board are well aware of our activities here. It may not be a policy on paper – but they have always given us the freedom to do what we need to do. They know what we’re dealing with here, so there’s no need to worry about your medical license or your freedom.”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t worried about either. I was worried about trying to psychoanalyze someone whose brain is simultaneously being turned into mush by another department I wasn’t even aware we had.” Harleen knew she sounded angry, but she decided to go with it. “You’re asking me, and my colleagues, to make an ice sculpture out of a glass of water.”

“Not your colleagues, Harleen. The only patient currently being treated with ECT is the Joker.” He let that sink in for a moment. “I trust you with the most dangerous patient in our care but I still need to ensure your safety.”

She stood up. “I can handle him without that. Do you know what Ernest Hemingway said about ECT, right before he killed himself? He realized he’d never be able to write again and said “It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient.” The Joker is a genius and it’s that intellect that may be salvageable now that he’s willing to communicate and work with us. He doesn’t need to be destroyed, he needs to be refocused.”

The senior doctor gave her a patronizing smile. “You’re so young and idealistic. Thirty years from now, you’ll be the first to use whatever it takes to keep someone under control and not killing your staff members. Have you forgotten what happened to Dr. Buchanan?”

Harleen had an idea. “All right, give me a chance to prove to you that he can be controlled without torture. I’d like him unrestrained for our sessions. I’ll bear the risk myself. If something happens, I’ll be the only one to suffer, and if I’m correct and he shows himself to be manageable, you’ll consider stopping the ECT?” She watched his reaction. He didn’t look pleased, but he also sensed a way to get her out of his office before she got some idealistic-young-person idea like going to the media with her discovery. And if she might do that, then sadly it would be in everybody’s best interests if the Joker snapped her neck.

“If you’re willing to take the risk, by all means, I’ll authorize that today.”

“Thank you.” She turned and headed out the door. So pretty, he thought, but a little too smart. She thinks she can succeed where everybody else has failed. She thinks she’s superior to them all. He wondered if she was going to be a problem.

Random headcanon: Harley still has her medical license because the Gotham Medical Board was too afraid to initiate proceedings against her when they found out who her boyfriend was. They just quietly took her off their online directory. She can still legally treat patients and prescribe drugs, which comes in extremely handy in her new line of work.

#joker and harley #joker x harley #harley x joker #harley quinn

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starnova-between-two-worlds · 6 years

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So I had to go to the hospital.

I was in the hospital last week, until last Wednesday. I’m not going to go into details as to why. I actually called myself in to the crisis line, requesting OUTPATIENT HELP, but then they sent some responder over who took me to the ER. So I was like “Okay, I’ll go to the ER, because maybe I really need to be in the ER right now.” And then it turns out that ER had completely trash social workers who thought listening to the patient was just an option and not something she’s supposed to do. So they ended up telling the doctors the OPPOSITE of what I actually told them, and so I ended up being sent to the hospital for 5 days. I will not be trusting a single fuckin’ person from that crisis organization ever again and I will be warning other people not to go to them unless they’re okay with ending up in hospital. I was looking for help, not to end up in a hospital for a week.

I’m gonna start off by quelling any worries and saying this was not a Bedlam-house style facility with Nurse Rachets and people running around howling into the night about the mark of the beast or whatever. Nobody put me in a straitjacket (they don’t even have those anymore) or any sort of restraint at all, and nobody gave me what Gibson calls “the butt needle” (thorazine), though I did have to watch some other patient get “the butt needle” (which isn’t in the butt, it’s on the hip) and it was fucking terrifying to see that happen in real life. I had my soulbonds with me the entire time, from the 5150 to the ER straight through to finally being free to go and eating an entire everything-in-front-of-me at Pizza Hut after having not had pizza in what felt like an eternity. Nobody bothered my soulbonds, except for some of the other patients, who I then avoided because fuck that. What I’m grateful for is that:

A. it was not a Bedlam house, and the nurses and doctors were actually very kind and caring towards me and the other patients.

B. I had gone in terrified due to all the stories I’ve heard of mental facilities that left patients in their own dirt and shit, stories of nurses and orderlies and doctors beating and raping patients, and patients being deemed “out of control” and thorazined for defending themselves, (Let me tell you right now there’s no way I wouldn’t go full animal mode against someone who was trying to sexually assault me) and the hospital turned out to be none of that at all. There was no threat to our safety from the nurses, doctors, and orderlies there, and they all treated us with kindness and actual respect.

C. Nobody bothered my soulbonds. The idea that they would actually terrified me most of all. That they would see my soulbonds, or rather see me interacting with them, and decide “Oh, she’s in psychosis, it’s butt-needle time.” This did not happen and eventually the doctor even deemed that my soulbonds were not consistent with active schizophrenic hallucinations.

The other patients were, for the most part, normal. I’m going to refrain from writing any details about them because it’s just not respectful to do, but except for one or two cases they were normal. The thing is that made me one of the least normal people on the ward, and the younger patients (my age or younger) sure as hell made it known that they wanted nothing to do with that. Once again, I was in a world full of humans and it was plain to see that I was not among them. After I overheard them laughing in the common room about “At least we’re not talking to invisible people!” about a day or 2 before my discharge, I decided fuck the common room forever except when we had wellness groups.

Up until then I had actually been perfectly willing to socialize with the humans. In fact, on my first day in the hospital I had been laughing and joking around and watching TV with the humans. And then eventually, they started to shrug me off and get short with me everytime I said anything to them. And then finally, they decided to tell me, “See? You belong here. I don’t.” And then that was it. I told them “I have to get treated like crap everywhere the fuck else. I am not going to put up with getting treated like crap here too” and stormed off. Of course this alerted the attention of a nurse, because everything at this hospital alerted the attention of a nurse. But instead of being a bitch with me about it she just asked me what was wrong and if I was okay, and comforted me when I told her what was going on.

I’m still losing sleep over what it really means to have been one of the least normal people in a psych ward.

The only thing I liked about the hospital were the groups. Unfortunately, when I came in on the weekend, there were very few groups. But when Monday hit, the entire day became filled with group after group after group. These were wellness groups, about managing your various conditions without being condition-specific, and it was like some kind of sorcery how the social workers could figure out how to manage every condition all under the same veil when mental conditions are so diverse. My favorite was the “Hope Spiral,” where we had to draw a spiral and then draw or write things in the spiral that gave us hope or got us through the day or made us feel better in general. I made a big spiral and wrote in what I find to be the most relatable lyrics in Quiet’s Theme from MGS5, one of my all-time favorite videogame songs:

Love hurts so bad

But still saved my soul

Flowers of a brighter past

They bloom so free beneath the sun...

The groups were honestly the kind of thing I had been looking for the whole time--a team of humans working with me both individually and as part of a group (since it was a team, there was a lot of time for the kind of individual, one-on-one work and support that I had been longing for ever since I was a teenager) to address things that needed to be addressed, in ways that went beyond just sitting in an office and talking. Groups had different activities and methods beyond just talking. Which is great, because I honestly hate “just talking,” due to my inability to actually talk like a person (I do NOT talk like you see me write here. I talk in fragments and broken words and monosyllables and mixed-up tones). I need to play a game or do an art project or write a story or copy lyrics down to get my points across in any sort of meaningful way. I attended every single group not only as part of my many-step plan to convince the doctors I didn’t need to be there anymore, but because I genuinely enjoyed the work and interaction with the care team. When I wasn’t with my soulbonds, I was with them.

The care team was another part of the hospital that I actually liked and appreciated. For the very first time in my entire life, I had an entire team of humans right there on call, ready and willing to assist in any way I needed them to. This had never happened to me before, and proved to be one of the most valuable resources I had ever had in my life. Most of the time I spent with them was simply because I was anxious--I was cut off entirely from everything I cared about, besides my soulbonds, my routine had been not only disrupted but completely and forcibly changed into a totally different routine, the rules and regulations at this place made little to no sense whatsoever and were not explained to me at all beyond, “It’s protocol, sorry,” I had none of my machines with me and instead had humans in place of them, where humans had never been before. I was terrified most of the time, and thankfully there was always some nurse or some social worker or other there to help quell that terror. They did not work against my soulbonds, nor did my soulbonds work against them, but rather, when my soulbonds saw me getting seized by terror and anxiety that they themselves couldn’t quell (as, without our tech, they were very limited on tools and resources for that), they would tell me to go see if I could talk to one of the nurses. When I wasn’t in group though, I was generally a nervous fucking wreck.

I was discharged after 5 days, even though they initially wanted to keep me for 7. I was set up with a psychiatrist and two outpatient programs, one for during the school term and one for when school is out. And you have no idea how fucking grateful I am for both of them. All I EVER wanted was a place to go, where I could work with humans who knew how to work with me and where I could be away from my Dad’s wife. I had called the hotline specifically because I wanted someone to take my dad’s wife away, or take me away from her (though I didn’t want that to mean “5 days in a hospital.” I had wanted it to mean what they finally gave me AFTER the 5 days in a hospital). Now they were finally going to do that, and give me my very own place to be surrounded by my very own care team of humans for 2 hours a day after school, 3-4 hours a day when school’s out. So really, good things DID come out of what was otherwise a pretty nasty experience for me.

Not only that, but my father is finally seeking out therapy for himself and his wife. Because my ending up in the hospital was the final reality check that I’d been trying to give him for years.

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theomegapointacademyblog · 3 years

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What a Shaman Sees in A Mental Hospital Stephanie Marohn with Malidoma Patrice Somé By WakingTimes August 22, 2014 https://umaincertaantropologia.org/2016/03/08/what-a-shaman-sees-in-a-mental-hospital-waking-times/ The Shamanic View of Mental Illness In the shamanic view, mental illness signals “the birth of a healer,” explains Malidoma Patrice Somé. Thus, mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, spiritual crises, and need to be regarded as such to aid the healer in being born. What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm. “Mental disorder, behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field,” says Dr. Somé. These disturbances result when the person does not get assistance in dealing with the presence of the energy from the spirit realm. One of the things Dr. Somé encountered when he first came to the United States in 1980 for graduate study was how this country deals with mental illness. When a fellow student was sent to a mental institute due to “nervous depression,” Dr. Somé went to visit him. “I was so shocked. That was the first time I was brought face to face with what is done here to people exhibiting the same symptoms I’ve seen in my village.” What struck Dr. Somé was that the attention given to such symptoms was based on pathology, on the idea that the condition is something that needs to stop. This was in complete opposition to the way his culture views such a situation. As he looked around the stark ward at the patients, some in straitjackets, some zoned out on medications, others screaming, he observed to himself, “So this is how the healers who are attempting to be born are treated in this culture. What a loss! What a loss that a person who is finally being aligned with a power from the other world is just being wasted.” Another way to say this, which may make more sense to the Western mind, is that we in the West are not trained in how to deal or even taught to acknowledge the existence of psychic phenomena, the spiritual world. In fact, psychic abilities are denigrated. When energies from the spiritual world emerge in a Western psyche, that individual is completely unequipped to integrate them or even recognize what is happening. The result can be terrifying. Without the proper context for and assistance in dealing with the breakthrough from another level of reality, for all practical purposes, the person is insane. Heavy dosing with anti-psychotic drugs compounds the problem and prevents the integration that could lead to soul development and growth in the individual who has received these energies. On the mental ward, Dr Somé saw a lot of “beings” hanging around the patients, “entities” that are invisible to most people but that shamans and psychics are able to see. “They were causing the crisis in these people,” he says. It appeared to him that these beings were trying to get the medications and their effects out of the bodies of the people the beings were trying to merge with, and were increasing the patients’ pain in the process. “The beings were acting almost like some kind of excavator in the energy field of people. They were really fierce about that. The people they were doing that to were just screaming and yelling,” he said. He couldn’t stay in that environment and had to leave. In the Dagara tradition, the community helps the person reconcile the energies of both worlds–”the world of the spirit that he or she is merged with, and the village and community.” That person is able then to serve as a bridge between the worlds and help the living with information and healing they need. Thus, the spiritual crisis ends with the birth of another healer. “The other world’s relationship with our world is one of sponsorship,” Dr. Somé explains. “More often than not, the knowledge and skills that arise from this kind of merger are a knowledge or a skill that is provided directly from the other world.” The beings who were increasing the pain of the inmates on the mental hospital ward were actually attempting to merge with the inmates in order to get messages through to this world. The people they had chosen to merge with were getting no assistance in learning how to be a bridge between the worlds and the beings’ attempts to merge were thwarted. The result was the sustaining of the initial disorder of energy and the aborting of the birth of a healer. “The Western culture has consistently ignored the birth of the healer,” states Dr. Somé. “Consequently, there will be a tendency from the other world to keep trying as many people as possible in an attempt to get somebody’s attention. They have to try harder.” The spirits are drawn to people whose senses have not been anesthetized. “The sensitivity is pretty much read as an invitation to come in,” he notes. Those who develop so-called mental disorders are those who are sensitive, which is viewed in Western culture as oversensitivity. Indigenous cultures don’t see it that way and, as a result, sensitive people don’t experience themselves as overly sensitive. In the West, “it is the overload of the culture they’re in that is just wrecking them,” observes Dr. Somé. The frenetic pace, the bombardment of the senses, and the violent energy that characterize Western culture can overwhelm sensitive people. Schizophrenia and Foreign Energy With schizophrenia, there is a special “receptivity to a flow of images and information, which cannot be controlled,” stated Dr. Somé. “When this kind of rush occurs at a time that is not personally chosen, and particularly when it comes with images that are scary and contradictory, the person goes into a frenzy.” What is required in this situation is first to separate the person’s energy from the extraneous foreign energies, by using shamanic practice (what is known as a “sweep”) to clear the latter out of the individual’s aura. With the clearing of their energy field, the person no longer picks up a flood of information and so no longer has a reason to be scared and disturbed, explains Dr. Somé. Then it is possible to help the person align with the energy of the spirit being attempting to come through from the other world and give birth to the healer. The blockage of that emergence is what creates problems. “The energy of the healer is a high-voltage energy,” he observes. “When it is blocked, it just burns up the person. It’s like a short-circuit. Fuses are blowing. This is why it can be really scary, and I understand why this culture prefers to confine these people. Here they are yelling and screaming, and they’re put into a straitjacket. That’s a sad image.” Again, the shamanic approach is to work on aligning the energies so there is no blockage, “fuses” aren’t blowing, and the person can become the healer they are meant to be. It needs to be noted at this point, however, that not all of the spirit beings that enter a person’s energetic field are there for the purposes of promoting healing. There are negative energies as well, which are undesirable presences in the aura. In those cases, the shamanic approach is to remove them from the aura, rather than work to align the discordant energies Alex: Crazy in the USA, Healer in Africa To test his belief that the shamanic view of mental illness holds true in the Western world as well as in indigenous cultures, Dr. Somé took a mental patient back to Africa with him, to his village. “I was prompted by my own curiosity to find out whether there’s truth in the universality that mental illness could be connected with an alignment with a being from another world,” says Dr. Somé. Alex was an 18-year-old American who had suffered a psychotic break when he was 14. He had hallucinations, was suicidal, and went through cycles of dangerously severe depression. He was in a mental hospital and had been given a lot of drugs, but nothing was helping. “The parents had done everything–unsuccessfully,” says Dr. Somé. “They didn’t know what else to do.” With their permission, Dr. Somé took their son to Africa. “After eight months there, Alex had become quite normal, Dr. Somé reports. He was even able to participate with healers in the business of healing; sitting with them all day long and helping them, assisting them in what they were doing with their clients . . . . He spent about four years in my village.” Alex stayed by choice, not because he needed more healing. He felt, “much safer in the village than in America.” To bring his energy and that of the being from the spiritual realm into alignment, Alex went through a shamanic ritual designed for that purpose, although it was slightly different from the one used with the Dagara people. “He wasn’t born in the village, so something else applied. But the result was similar, even though the ritual was not literally the same,” explains Dr. Somé. The fact that aligning the energy worked to heal Alex demonstrated to Dr. Somé that the connection between other beings and mental illness is indeed universal. After the ritual, Alex began to share the messages that the spirit being had for this world. Unfortunately, the people he was talking to didn’t speak English (Dr. Somé was away at that point). The whole experience led, however, to Alex’s going to college to study psychology. He returned to the United States after four years because “he discovered that all the things that he needed to do had been done, and he could then move on with his life.” The last that Dr. Somé heard was that Alex was in graduate school in psychology at Harvard. No one had thought he would ever be able to complete undergraduate studies, much less get an advanced degree. Dr. Somé sums up what Alex’s mental illness was all about: “He was reaching out. It was an emergency call. His job and his purpose was to be a healer. He said no one was paying attention to that.” After seeing how well the shamanic approach worked for Alex, Dr. Somé concluded that spirit beings are just as much an issue in the West as in his community in Africa. “Yet the question still remains, the answer to this problem must be found here, instead of having to go all the way overseas to seek the answer. There has to be a way in which a little bit of attention beyond the pathology of this whole experience leads to the possibility of coming up with the proper ritual to help people. Longing for Spiritual Connection A common thread that Dr. Somé has noticed in “mental” disorders in the West is “a very ancient ancestral energy that has been placed in stasis, that finally is coming out in the person.” His job then is to trace it back, to go back in time to discover what that spirit is. In most cases, the spirit is connected to nature, especially with mountains or big rivers, he says. In the case of mountains, as an example to explain the phenomenon, “it’s a spirit of the mountain that is walking side by side with the person and, as a result, creating a time-space distortion that is affecting the person caught in it.” What is needed is a merger or alignment of the two energies, “so the person and the mountain spirit become one.” Again, the shaman conducts a specific ritual to bring about this alignment. Dr. Somé believes that he encounters this situation so often in the United States because “most of the fabric of this country is made up of the energy of the machine, and the result of that is the disconnection and the severing of the past. You can run from the past, but you can’t hide from it.” The ancestral spirit of the natural world comes visiting. “It’s not so much what the spirit wants as it is what the person wants,” he says. “The spirit sees in us a call for something grand, something that will make life meaningful, and so the spirit is responding to that.” That call, which we don’t even know we are making, reflects “a strong longing for a profound connection, a connection that transcends materialism and possession of things and moves into a tangible cosmic dimension. Most of this longing is unconscious, but for spirits, conscious or unconscious doesn’t make any difference.” They respond to either. As part of the ritual to merge the mountain and human energy, those who are receiving the “mountain energy” are sent to a mountain area of their choice, where they pick up a stone that calls to them. They bring that stone back for the rest of the ritual and then keep it as a companion; some even carry it around with them. “The presence of the stone does a lot in tuning the perceptive ability of the person,” notes Dr. Somé. “They receive all kinds of information that they can make use of, so it’s like they get some tangible guidance from the other world as to how to live their life.” When it is the “river energy,” those being called go to the river and, after speaking to the river spirit, find a water stone to bring back for the same kind of ritual as with the mountain spirit. “People think something extraordinary must be done in an extraordinary situation like this,” he says. That’s not usually the case. Sometimes it is as simple as carrying a stone. A Sacred Ritual Approach to Mental Illness One of the gifts a shaman can bring to the Western world is to help people rediscover ritual, which is so sadly lacking. “The abandonment of ritual can be devastating. From the spiritual view, ritual is inevitable and necessary if one is to live,” Dr. Somé writes in Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community. “To say that ritual is needed in the industrialized world is an understatement. We have seen in my own people that it is probably impossible to live a sane life without it.” Dr. Somé did not feel that the rituals from his traditional village could simply be transferred to the West, so over his years of shamanic work here, he has designed rituals that meet the very different needs of this culture. Although the rituals change according to the individual or the group involved, he finds that there is a need for certain rituals in general. One of these involves helping people discover that their distress is coming from the fact that they are “called by beings from the other world to cooperate with them in doing healing work.” Ritual allows them to move out of the distress and accept that calling. Another ritual need relates to initiation. In indigenous cultures all over the world, young people are initiated into adulthood when they reach a certain age. The lack of such initiation in the West is part of the crisis that people are in here, says Dr. Somé. He urges communities to bring together “the creative juices of people who have had this kind of experience, in an attempt to come up with some kind of an alternative ritual that would at least begin to put a dent in this kind of crisis.” Another ritual that repeatedly speaks to the needs of those coming to him for help entails making a bonfire, and then putting into the bonfire “items that are symbolic of issues carried inside the individuals . . . It might be the issues of anger and frustration against an ancestor who has left a legacy of murder and enslavement or anything, things that the descendant has to live with,” he explains. “If these are approached as things that are blocking the human imagination, the person’s life purpose, and even the person’s view of life as something that can improve, then it makes sense to begin thinking in terms of how to turn that blockage into a roadway that can lead to something more creative and more fulfilling.” The example of issues with an ancestors touches on rituals designed by Dr. Somé that address a serious dysfunction in Western society and in the process “trigger enlightenment” in participants. These are ancestral rituals, and the dysfunction they are aimed at is the mass turning-of-the-back on ancestors. Some of the spirits trying to come through, as described earlier, may be “ancestors who want to merge with a descendant in an attempt to heal what they weren’t able to do while in their physical body.” “Unless the relationship between the living and the dead is in balance, chaos ensues,” he says. “The Dagara believe that, if such an imbalance exists, it is the duty of the living to heal their ancestors. If these ancestors are not healed, their sick energy will haunt the souls and psyches of those who are responsible for helping them.” The rituals focus on healing the relationship with our ancestors, both specific issues of an individual ancestor and the larger cultural issues contained in our past. Dr. Somé has seen extraordinary healing occur at these rituals. Taking a sacred ritual approach to mental illness rather than regarding the person as a pathological case gives the person affected–and indeed the community at large–the opportunity to begin looking at it from that vantage point too, which leads to “a whole plethora of opportunities and ritual initiative that can be very, very beneficial to everyone present,” states. Dr. Somé. Excerpted from: The Natural Medicine Guide to Schizophrenia, or The Natural Medicine Guide to Bi-polar Disorder, pages 178-189, Stephanie Marohn (featuring Malidoma Patrice Somé).

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