Norm Lane, can you please elaborate on your issue with this terminology?

As cited by the Washington Post, in his book Shamans Among Us, Canadian evolutionary psychologist Joseph Polimeni theorizes that schizophrenics are just modern-day equivalents of ancient shamanic healers, moving through multiple planes of existence at once.

Uh.. I sometimes wonder about the sanity of psychologists, due to stuff like this. My aunt, by marriage to my uncle, who.. imho wasn’t always all there either, when she was “up” ran the ward at a psychiatric hospital. When she was having an episode she liked to lock her kids in a closet, or a cardboard box, and poke at them with the end of a vacuum cleaner. If that is what a “shaman” was in the old days people should have been running away from them, not venerating them. I also suspect that he has *never* actually talked to an actual modern shaman, from the cultures that still practice it, like, at all.

Oh, you could probably argue, rightly, that she was an extreme case, but.. This sounds like something straight out of evo-psych, a branch of the two combined sciences that seems to be, always, and universally, about picking something you want to be true, or some bias society already has, then making up an explanation, out of the thin air, about how it must be how it got this way (both more sensible psychologists, and pretty much every single scientist I know about who deal with genetics, or anything else where actual research is needed to test ones ideas, think these people are a complete joke). There are two massive problems with this –

1. The people doing it, despite their claim to be scientific about it, often do exactly what you rightly accuse the detractors of sex workers for doing – ignoring the evidence, or the people, who contradict their assumptions. In this case, modern, existing, people that practice some class of shamanism, in favor of making up some untestable idea that, “In some vague past, this was where it came from.”.

2. Failing at the one single *key* factor than makes something science in the first place: You have to be able to test your hypothesis, and when you do, your goal is to hammer it to death, to see if it breaks, then, and only then, calling it theory, and presenting in as an answer, if it actually bloody works (How exactly does anything in evo-psych do this? You can’t even study modern people, in most cases, to test the idea, never mind go back in time to find out how and why some social view, or apparent idea came into use). I mean, sure you can say, “Modern people do X.”, and “if” you study history, archeology, and other sciences, you can sometimes show when something showed up, sort of, and how it progressed, some times, but.. not “why”, or always “how”. The answer, in most cases, with less biased minds, is almost always – humans can adapt to almost any stupid ideas, even bad ones. Which doesn’t, ever, explain why the ones that survived did, which ones are actually bad, or good, nor how they came to become dominate, just that they where not such horrible ideas they made us dead.

3. When it becomes obvious that they pulled this out of their ass, its not defensible from evidence, and/or there is evidence they didn’t collect, or ignored, which contradict it, how exactly does the choice of using such scientifically unsound, but maybe comforting (hence the decision to fall for it), nonsense help defend against the accusation that everyone doing what you do is nuts, or damaged? After all, you picked a nuts idea to explain away why you have a diagnosed disorder. You see this sort of failure to find contrary evidence in everything from psychologists trying to explain why girls like pink (ignoring that its been less than 200 years since pink was too passionate for girls, and they should wear chaste blue), to why boys are aggressive (something shown, in many studies, to not be the case, until social cues “guide” the girls towards using other methods to act out, because its “not what little girls do!”), to.. every other social idea that someone feels the need to “explain” as an adaptation, which needs to be explained.

So.. the idea that shamanism stems out of schizophrenia… Lets see evidence on this, not some book filled with evo-psych speculation and just so stories. And.. for the love of Zod.. don’t use this sort of stuff to try to promote the idea that the detractors of sex work, for example, or being “unfair” about how nuts the people doing it might be. It won’t help the cause. At best, it will just make people like me, whose only bias is, “Everyone, even me, believed stupid BS.”, shake their head and sigh at the silliness of even mentioning it.

Yes yes yes. It’s so difficult for people to understand that, though sex work isn’t all sunshine and rainbows (and really, what work is?), a “normal” job can cause far more problems for some people with MI than sex work does.

Amen!

Thank you for this; it was really empowering to read this. I have borderline tendencies, which I feel like have actually helped me perform sex work well! The extreme emotional oscillations help me to regulate proximity/distance to clients effectively. I tried to write a paper once for a uni course on affective labour, in which I proposed, based on my experience, that the borderline personality may actually be the “ideal” type for sex work:-) but my professor almost failed me for it, saying that my thesis was unethical…