- Joined
- Sep 21, 2025
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I agree with a couple points already noted. And I will say that this is a mostly American/Western viewpoint.
In the shamanic context, especially in Africa, parts of Asia, and parts of Europe, people don't chose to become a shaman - it chooses you. It's a job role and people don't dabble in it. It's as free of people with mental health issues as anything else.
Meanwhile, in the West, there's a lot more people with mild or emergent mental illness that get into generally esoteric things, rather than the other way around, IMO due to a combination of factors.
A culture of allowing signs of mental illness to go undiagnosed for a while because the lack of treatment options, is a huge factor.
Mental health issues also manifest in a person's early adult life (16-25 typically), which is also when a lot of Westerns go to college and have opportunities to learn that life isn't just what your parents say it is, and practice whatever you want however you want. So the overlap in timing of discovery and mental health issues in the West further promotes this inaccurate correlation. If you look at any polarizing topic, the same pattern begins to emerge - UFOs, religion, politics, art. Did art make van Gough crazy? Of course not.
Plus, esoteric and fringe groups are full of outsiders who generally don't want to gatekeep a space (well, sometimes). So it becomes difficult for "out there" people to not just challenge someone else with increasingly "way too out there" statements, but also to try and help that person seek treatment when the person that needs reatment doesn't see a difference between them and everyone else. Imagine being the person at the UFO convention telling someone they need to leave and get professional help? Even families have trouble navigating that, so it's easier to just let them be if they're not violent or dangerous.
As for the dangers of the esoteric, they are as real as the dangers of anything else. Eating food is dangerous (5,500 choking deaths in 2023 in the US alone), driving a car is extremely dangerous (44,800 deaths in 2023 in the US alone), walking on stairs (killed or injured 12,000 annually in the US alone), yet none of these are seen as risky things do to. No one blames the stairs or a hot dog if either kills someone, right? Personally, I also think that people that dabble in the esoteric and don't know what they're doing can and do invite or allow entities that can harm them. The difference is that since magic and shamanism are real, those problems that are actually spiritual or magical problems can be removed and resolved. Mental health problems don't just go away forever after a spell and a salt wash purification and a smoke cleanse.
Even just meditating can (rarely) induce psychosis from both the breakdown of the ego and simply being a path to drastically changing someone's worldview, which may be a huge part of how they define themselves. Some people simply can go too far into something - anything - and get messed up in the process. History is full of people who were obsessive to the point of mania about all sorts of things. Western Culture ignores or even rewards that behavior in some fields (if there's $$$ involved), but when the topic of choice is magic or an esoteric subject, it's much more often cherry-picked by people who feel the support of normal society behind them to say that [insert esoteric thing here] caused the mental health issue, not the other way around.
In the shamanic context, especially in Africa, parts of Asia, and parts of Europe, people don't chose to become a shaman - it chooses you. It's a job role and people don't dabble in it. It's as free of people with mental health issues as anything else.
Meanwhile, in the West, there's a lot more people with mild or emergent mental illness that get into generally esoteric things, rather than the other way around, IMO due to a combination of factors.
A culture of allowing signs of mental illness to go undiagnosed for a while because the lack of treatment options, is a huge factor.
Mental health issues also manifest in a person's early adult life (16-25 typically), which is also when a lot of Westerns go to college and have opportunities to learn that life isn't just what your parents say it is, and practice whatever you want however you want. So the overlap in timing of discovery and mental health issues in the West further promotes this inaccurate correlation. If you look at any polarizing topic, the same pattern begins to emerge - UFOs, religion, politics, art. Did art make van Gough crazy? Of course not.
Plus, esoteric and fringe groups are full of outsiders who generally don't want to gatekeep a space (well, sometimes). So it becomes difficult for "out there" people to not just challenge someone else with increasingly "way too out there" statements, but also to try and help that person seek treatment when the person that needs reatment doesn't see a difference between them and everyone else. Imagine being the person at the UFO convention telling someone they need to leave and get professional help? Even families have trouble navigating that, so it's easier to just let them be if they're not violent or dangerous.
As for the dangers of the esoteric, they are as real as the dangers of anything else. Eating food is dangerous (5,500 choking deaths in 2023 in the US alone), driving a car is extremely dangerous (44,800 deaths in 2023 in the US alone), walking on stairs (killed or injured 12,000 annually in the US alone), yet none of these are seen as risky things do to. No one blames the stairs or a hot dog if either kills someone, right? Personally, I also think that people that dabble in the esoteric and don't know what they're doing can and do invite or allow entities that can harm them. The difference is that since magic and shamanism are real, those problems that are actually spiritual or magical problems can be removed and resolved. Mental health problems don't just go away forever after a spell and a salt wash purification and a smoke cleanse.
Even just meditating can (rarely) induce psychosis from both the breakdown of the ego and simply being a path to drastically changing someone's worldview, which may be a huge part of how they define themselves. Some people simply can go too far into something - anything - and get messed up in the process. History is full of people who were obsessive to the point of mania about all sorts of things. Western Culture ignores or even rewards that behavior in some fields (if there's $$$ involved), but when the topic of choice is magic or an esoteric subject, it's much more often cherry-picked by people who feel the support of normal society behind them to say that [insert esoteric thing here] caused the mental health issue, not the other way around.