Henry's Demons

I've just heard extracts from Henry's Demons on Radio 4, a father and son account of living with Schizophrenia.

It strikes me as completely tragic how people with what I perceive to be emergent shamanic characteristics are treated. The system jumps upon them and tries to deaden them. It simply tries to deaden them, and the person experiencing them. And it succeeds - it succeeds in a deadening effect. It does not succeed at health or healing.

I tried to send this to Patrick Cowburn, the co-author, but he's proving hard to connect with.

Dear Patrick

I have just heard Henry's Demons on radio 4.

I would encourage Henry to read four books:

Nature and the Human Soul by Bill Plotkin

Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin

Talking with Nature/ Journey into Nature by Michael J Roads.
Shamanism: Ecstatic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, and

I am a social researcher and I have worked for, for example, the think-tank Demos and Government departments.

For the past two years I have been contracted to research practices of collective joy, which has led me to an understanding of ritual, rites of passage, and the role of the shaman in shamanic cultures.

It is my strong belief that what Henry is experiencing is not schizophrenia but shamanic characteristics trying to come into life.

Many of the experiences he reports - following the guidance of the wind, 'hearing' messages (not with one's ears but with one's mind) from nature and so on - are perceived by many, including US psychologist Bill Plotkin and myself, to be healthy.

Moreover, the shamanic role can provide a powerful service to community wellbeing and our culture is, to my eyes, thirsty for it.

I am currently writing a book about this.

I too had a kind of 'breakdown' when I was in my first term at Brighton University. I went on to study political science at Berkeley, graduate with a first, and have a healthy life and career. I lost my dear childhood friend Charlie to schizoprenia and, later, suicide, a week after his thirtieth birthday. His death was not said to be due to a particularly bad bout of symptoms and symptom/system conflict. Rather it seemed to be a measured decision; one has expectations of how life should look by the age of thirty, and, upon reaching it, Charlie saw how his life compared to those of his old friends and decided to step aside.

Coming to understand the role and characteristics of the shaman I see these in Charlie. My friend Jo lost her brother Ed to schizophrenia and suicide and seeing videos of him, one sees again these characteristics - the deep and instinctual empathy, the instinct for music and poetry, the ability to see and voice the subtle, the connection to nature, the sense of spiritual opening to messages from the non-human world.

These are qualities that we all too easily dismiss as psychopathy and try to suppress with drugs and institutionalization, but these responses do not seem to work.

I write this to you with hope for Henry.

I am a social innovator, I have created successful social projects before and I am currently mulling about What To Do With This One. It is not yet clear but is becoming so.

I am also a singer, by the way, and I hear voices! They're what I rely on. I've sung on cheesy pop chart records but that is not the musical world in which I find utter magic; it is more in the circles of Zimbabwean Shona music, which has a totally different understanding of the spiritual world, where I hear these voices, and I follow what I hear, and what I then sing to others brings them a sense of magic. I am receiving teaching in this from Chartwell Dutiro who used to teach Ethnomusicology at Soas.

O, on that note, I would also recommend The Healing Wisdom of Africa by Dr Malidoma Some.

I wish Henry, you and your family all the very best with what I hope can become a healthy growth out of and beyond this situation.

Yours sincerely,

Briony