The Connection Between Psychosis and the Shamanic Experience

In the 1950s and 1960s, leading psychiatrists considered shamanism to be schizophrenic or manic depressive. Now can you imagine an indigenous shaman taking a psychological test? They had less pathology than other people in the community. That is one thing that began to change people's opinions on shamans from the academic point of view. Some anthropologists who were not buying into the psychoanalytic interpretation didn't just study the shamans but lived with them.