Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening: Phil Borges at TEDxUMKC

relief blocked him due to the stigma of his mental illness. By the way, Adam is not alone in this. When having bipolarity, schizophrenia, depression, any of these heavy psychological episodes. Here are some statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health. One in five of us will suffer a psychological crisis during our lifetime. By the way, that is a growing number right now. The other thing is that one in 20 will be disabled because of it. Another interesting fact about this phenomenon is that 50% occur before the age of 14. By the way, for most shamans, this happened in their teens or teens.

Seventy-five percent before age 24. So it's more or less a youth phenomenon. Here is the difference in cultures I noticed. The Shaman Advantage. One, they have a cultural context. The physiological crisis, although difficult, is believed to be difficult: it is placed in a positive perspective. It is something that the person will come out of and be stronger in the end. He has more skills in the end. The other thing that is a big advantage is that he is not stigmatized. If you have the stamp of mental illness on your forehead, or on your record, or whatever, you're not going to get a job.

It's not like having diabetes or even cancer. It is one of the most stigmatized things that can happen to a person in our culture. And especially, if a child has these visions and doesn't know what's happening to him, and the doctor comes and says, "You're broken and you are this," you can imagine how that compounds the problem. The other advantage they have is that they have a mentor, they have someone who has been through this process, who can take them by the hand and say, "Listen, I know what this is all about and this is how to manage it." And the third thing that is a big advantage is that they have a community that accepts what they have been through.

Not only that, they have an outlet for their talents. Many of these people have specific talents that the average person does not have. So, that's an advantage if you're in one of these indigenous communities. I don't know if you heard the recent TED talk by a woman named Eleanor Longden. Has anyone heard that? Went viral. She did it a couple of months ago. This is a young woman, when she went to college she started hearing voices. She said: "My nightmare started when I told my roommate that I was hearing voices." Her roommate said, "You better see a doctor." So she went to see the doctor.

The doctor said, "You'd better consult a psychiatrist." She went to see the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist labeled him "schizophrenia" and prescribed medication. By the way, these medications suppress the symptoms, they do not attack the root of the problem. She said that from that point on, she just spiraled. You should listen to her video on how she got out of it. She finally got to the point where she said, "I realized that those voices were helping me resolve this old childhood trauma of sexual abuse." But it took her and a couple of her friends who believed in her to get her out of that hole she had fallen into because of that stigma.

So if you have one of these problems, if one of us has one of these problems, we go to someone. The common method of treatment is to suppress symptoms with pharmaceuticals. So with Adam, we've been following, and so I've been posting this on our blog for the last year and a half, how he's doing and what's going on. By the way, he is now homeless, as many end up. And we've started interviewing professionals who take a completely different approach to this problem. And in fact, some of the psychiatrists and psychologists that we have interviewed and that we also publish, affirm that many of these cases, not all, but many of them, are

spiritual

emergencies.

And they believe, as I do now, that if you hold these people back, if you don't stigmatize them, if you don't scare them with the label and tell them they're broken, and if you give them a place of support, that the psyche itself is self-healing. . You will take them and eventually resolve whatever is going on with them, and they will usually come out at a higher level of consciousness than when you approached the problem in the first place. There are many people who believe (we have interviewed historians and cultural anthropologists) that our species is in crisis right now.

If we look at the environment, we look at the economic system, we look at what is happening with our continued wars, and we are asked to raise our consciousness to a completely different level. I just want to end with this statement from one of our most famous scientists, and I love this statement, he says, I'll just quote: "We humans tend to experience ourselves as something separate from the whole that we call the Universe. This is in reality an optical deception of our consciousness. It is like a prison for us. Our task is to free ourselves from this prison through our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and all of Nature in their struggle for such beauty.

Achievement is a path. towards our liberation and the only true foundation of our inner peace and security." That was Albert Einstein. Thank you so much. (Applause)