This is a form of coercion in and of itself. And as there's no such thing as prophecy, or magical cures, it turns out to be a profoundly unhelpful kind of coercion, both for the "shaman" and the society in general.
I'm schizotypal myself and I can say those methods of coping with this have not helped me at all. By now, I understand most of my paranormal thoughts are just windows into the unconcious mind. I think that having a centuries old tradition of identifying and using these thoughts would have helped me better than talking to psychiatrists that don't have the slightest clue about what goes on in my mind.
Probably because a scientific framework of mind exists which you have access to, which allows you to accept that what goes on in your mind doesn't always correspond to reality. In a shamanistic society, you might still be led to believe you had magic powers, and that it was all real, and that you had to follow certain rituals to purify yourself or to interpret the signs from the gods, or whatever. Is that useful? Do shamans really know anything more about what's going on in a person's mind than doctors?
Both are coercive, though, which was my point. "Non-coercive" societies are still coercive, they just draw the lines in different places than modern societies do.
What if these voices are reflective of the emotional state of the people around them, as this quote suggests?
In that case, that is a kind of "magic", a special ability only you possess, that is real, and if you followed certain rituals your own emotional state could stabilise to such a point where you have the ability to detect what people are feeling.
And if this is true, then yes, a shaman would know more about what's going on in a person's mind than a doctor.
If you close your eyes, it doesn't mean the world isn't real. Just because you can't see something with the scientific framework, yet, does not mean it cannot be true.
Anyway, I don't see what coercion has got to do with shaman's in particular. There was plenty of people captured as slaves, in conflicts between prehistoric tribes, and that's a lot more coercion happening than in a schizophrenic being picked out as a shaman. There's probably less mental illness in prehistoric societies, because people probably didn't care much about a slave going crazy, it's likely unsurprising that happens, and you just kill them off.
I think coercion comes in cycles. Just after U.S. independence from Britain was probably less coercion than before U.S. independence. Today there is probably more coercion in U.S. than in 1850. There is less coercion today in Shanghai than in 1960, but probably more than in 1925.
We've internalized a world of psychic war and we see nothing but liabilities. If we had the same reverence for wackos that we do for other victims we may be far better off. The wackos certainly would be. Is that coercion? Can you see anything else?
But i'm arguing specifically against the shamanistic point of view in the gp. Should we treat mental illness exactly the same as any other? Absolutely. The stigma behind mental illness, I believe, is a vestige from the days when most people thought such things were the work of demons. People can't accept that someone who thinks and sees the world so differently is just as human as they are. But reverence? No. Being told that you've been touched by God can be a prison of its own.
My initial point was just that there's probably a big number of cases of mental illness in traditional societies that we can't diagnose because our ways of coping with these are so different that they manifest in completely different ways.
Isn't that quite a strong claim?
It seems fair that an assertion offered without proof can be dismissed without proof.