Schizophrenic ... or Shaman? A proposal for a Steemit-exclusive online course

One of my favorite shows from the 1990s, Northern Exposure, had a particular model of medicine that combined science and mystical experience.

Other posters on Steemit, such as @carlidos and @invisiblegorilla, have written about the difficulty in diagnosing mental conditions based on the current "cluster of symptoms" model the DSM uses, when we don't know much about their underlying biological causes.  This article from Nautilus points out another important issue, that other cultures seem to handle schizophrenics better than we do.

Adding to the complexity, schizophrenia looks different across cultures.  Several studies by the World Health Organization have compared outcomes of schizophrenia in the U.S. and Western Europe with outcomes in developing nations like Ghana and India. After following patients for five years, researchers found that those in developing countries fared “considerably better” than those in the developed countries. In one study, nearly 37 percent of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in developing countries were asymptomatic after two years, compared to only 15.5 percent in the U.S. and Europe. In India, about half of people diagnosed with schizophrenia are able to hold down jobs, compared to only 15 percent in the U.S.

This is dramatized and personalized through the story of American journalist Dick Russell and his son Frank, who had a psychotic break at age 17.

Had Frank been born into the Dagara tribe, and experienced the same breakdown at age 17 that led him to run from his friend’s apartment, Malidoma tells me that the community would have immediately rallied around him, performing the same rituals that his sister experienced. Following this intervention, his tribe members would begin the work of healing Frank and re-integrating him back into the community; once he was ready, he’d receive a prominent position. “He’d be known as a man of spirit, who’d be able to provide insight into the deep problems of the people around them,” he says.

This is very similar to the way Joseph Campbell described Lakota shaman Black Elk in a series of interviews with Bill Moyers.

Black Elk was a young Sioux or Dakota, as they are often called, boy around nine years old, before the American cavalry had encountered the Sioux. They were the great people of the plains. And this boy became sick, psychologically sick. His family…I’m telling the typical shaman story. The child begins to tremble, and is immobilized, and the family’s terribly concerned about it. And they send for a shaman who had had the experience in his own youth, to come as a psychoanalyst, you might say, and pull the youngster out of it. But instead of relieving him of the deities, he is adapting him to the deities, and the deities to himself, you might say. 

Several years ago, I took all these ideas and mixed them up with an MTV cartoon called The Maxx, based on the Image comic of the same name.  I've been teaching this short course (one lesson per episode of the cartoon) to high school students at a summer enrichment program face-to-face since about 2008, and now I've developed an online version of it through MoodleCloud.com.  I am considering opening this up to the Steemit audience and accepting SBD in return for teaching it, if there is enough interest.

What do you all think?  Please reply in the comments with your ideas on fair pricing and thoughts about having to go through an external platform in addition to any up-votes.