Could my Grandmother have been a Shaman, rather than a Schizophrenic?

I wrote this video/audio/blog essay called: Could my Grandmother have been a Shaman, rather than a Schizophrenic?

Dedicated to my Brother, Jordhan.

This video essay was written completely by a real person-ME!  I also edited it myself, making hundreds of edits and did not use AI in the process. I’ve worked on this essay for over a year, and I’m really excited to share it with you all. It has been a long labor, but I am so happy to be birthing this writing into the world. 

This essay is for folks or families who know someone living with bi-polar disorder or schizophrenia or live with it themselves.

I wrote this to help each and every one of us understand a different perspective to schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. I want to introduce a perspective that maybe we’ve never thought about.

When people normally think of bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia they think of crazy mood swings, hallucinations, hearing voices, medications, mental institutions and treatments.

I want us to start thinking about bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia in a different way. This way suggests that bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia actually might be an unhealed medicine man or woman, who has real gifts, but sadly, never met anyone that could help nourish or support those gifts.

I wrote this essay, because my grandmother experienced this very story, and I want her to have redemption.

My grandmother, Jane had to live in and out of hospitals and mental institutions, when she actually may have had gifts to share with her community, but no one to show her how to use her gifts.

I want to begin this essay about a story from my mother’s childhood.

Once upon a time, in Utica NY, there lived a very poor, very Polish family. They lived in a white house. It was two story, and there lived 8 people. A family of 5 girls, 1 boy, a mom and dad. They really cared about each-other, and there was warmth between them, even when things were hard. The white house had centerpiece in the kitchen, that gleaned as an old metal wood stove where the family gathered every morning and night. They cooked on this stove, and it also heated their entire home. It was often cold in their home. They didn’t have a lot of money, but they had each-other.

Flash-back to a  rainy night. During these nights, my mother and her sisters had to take flashlights out into the cool spring air and pick worms. They had made a home-made sign on the tree out in front of their house that said “Worms for 1 cent”. People would come to that old white house, and buy them for a penny. They had to save all their old cans from soup or spaghetti sauce to put the worms and dirt in to! Eventually they increased the price of worms from 1 cent to 1 and 1/2 cents, so people had to order in even numbers. Their dad, a gruff but loving guy-would say “Go out there and get pick some worms!” Because they needed to, in order to survive. I share this story because it highlights the context in which my grandmother was born into. A rural, poor neighborhood in upstate New York, with generations of immigrant families trying to survive.

My grandmother was given a true and longstanding diagnosis of bipolar disorder with schizophrenia, and was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for all of my mother’s childhood. As for my mom, she grew up being taken care of by her sisters. They gave her advice, made her food, walked her places, and guided her throughout the world. She raised me a similar way-kind of like a sister.

My grandmother, in her early 20’s, entered into the hospital for shock therapy due to her bipolar disorder with the help of her beloved, Leo-my grandfather. Shock therapy entailed touching cold metal plates to a person’s temples, to ‘reset’ the brain by inducing a controlled seizure.

Sometimes I imagine seeing a nurse with a crisp white cotton dress and a blue collar in the 1960’s, smiling compassionately at her and my grandfather.

Yet, my grandmother, resistant to the therapy, knew deep down, that shock therapy might not have been the answer she needed.

This is where I’d like us to consider another way of looking at bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia. I know the only solutions were lithium and hospitalization at the time, and they needed to work with what they had, but I would like to imagine a different reality for that time period, or for future generations.

I believe the answer my grandmother needed, was a spiritual one.

Bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia are chronic brain ‘dis-orders’ where folks experience hallucinations, mood swings, high mania, deep depression, and disorganized speech and behavior.

They navigate counselors, medications, institutions, doctors, and therapies. They fear when they hear voices call their names, and smell smells that aren’t there, and are afraid to talk about these things, for fear of being institutionalized.

Notice the use of ‘disorder’ here. I wonder, is it possible for us to view the healing of schizophrenia as a means of going from ‘dis-order, to ‘order’? There is currently no known ‘cure’ for bi-polar disorder or schizophrenia, but could there be a way to go from dis-order, to order-one day?

Isn’t that what the earth is doing around us anyway? Chaos, to order, in natural disasters. Or our body is cut, and then it heals. Could we heal these ‘DIS-ORDERS’ through human ‘order’ of the mind and psyche? Rather than medications, shock therapy and mental institutions?

This a new way of looking at bi-polar disorder and I ask you, dear reader, to continue to have open mind and continue to read or listen with curiosity.

If you’ve ever been around a schizophrenic person, in a nursing home, for example, you’d notice a certain rhythm in their ‘disordered speech’.

If you ever had a chance to hear them sing or talk, sometimes their speech kind of sounds like a certain rhythm or ordered pattern of sound. What is fascinating about hearing this kind of unique sound pattern, is that it reminds me of something called an ‘icaros’. These are special songs that shamans or medicine women sing, in ceremonies with plant medicines like ayahuasca.

Something is also similar between schizophrenics and shamanesses or medicine women. Both truly look connected to other worlds, behind their eyes is a deep vast universe, yet in the shaman, they are usually muddled by medication, doctors and suburbia.

People with schizophrenia have ‘auditory hallucinations and olfactory hallucinations’. Do you know that shamans or local medicine women also have ‘auditory hallucinations and olfactory hallucinations?’ Except in their world, they are called ‘messages from the other side’. And these messages contain information on how to cure people. Medicine men and women could smell plant spirits guiding them, or smell illness or body odors, chemicals, smoke, feces etc. These smells gave them clues about the health of their community or people they were healing. They received guidance from plants, from the dead, gods, spirits or ancestors. This is completely normal in many cultures, just not ours.

Let’s define shaman or a medicine woman.

What exactly is a shaman?

It’s actually a Russian and Germanic word, referring to anybody who contacts a spirit world, while in an altered state of consciousness. A medicine woman is a traditional healer, who blends herbs, prayer and ritual to help heal her community. Often connecting to the spiritual realms for guidance and help, they connect to voices and images unseen.

Are we seeing any similarities here?

Let’s go back to these Icaros/songs, and compare them to the auditory hallucinations schizophrenics hear. Even though they are understood to be songs, icaros are actually an ancient language of plant spirits from the rainforest. They are tones and syllables and language patterns that interact with the psyche, nervous system and body. They bypass the thinking mind entirely. It’s interesting, because the current medical model of treatment does the opposite, and ONLY focuses on the thinking mind.

These sounds belong in ceremony and healing spaces, not every day speech. Unfortunately a schizophrenic doesn’t have any ceremony or healing spaces to provide or go into. Icaros or prayers ‘reorganize’ through sound. What if schizophrenics were just receiving disordered ‘healing’ technologies? Ones they never learned how to organize or transmit through rights of passage?

We don’t currently have an answer in the medical model of treatment for schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder. Yet I wonder if future models would consider bringing in ‘mysticism, shamanism and psychology’ all together in order to help heal a person heal from their illness or disorder? Or they may even consider bringing in mentor shamans from their lineage or culture to help mentor them into their gifts.

If we heal a shaman, the shaman needs a culture and a community to be connected with and believe in him or her. Both are intertwined. Perhaps the illness is actually in our culture and our beliefs and not with our schizophrenics, who have no model to follow or no ecosystem for their gifts to land in.

Let me explain a little bit more about these ecosystems, rights of passages, and these special gifts I’ve been talking about. 

Let’s go into the Amazon and follow the story of a young girl named Laura. Laura was born in the jungle to a tribe of people called the Shipibo.

The people in her tribe saw that she had gifts as a young girl. She would have had visions or abilities to interact with plant and spirit beings, intense sensitivities and eccentricities, dreams, connections or an ability to see energy and patterns in community ceremonies. She may have  heard healing songs, or she may have experienced a ‘shamanic illness’ or an intense personal suffering.

With Laura, there were many shamanic elders that came before her, including her mother. With the guidance of her elders, she learned to go into isolation and drink brews from different plants for weeks and years on end, learning from the plants and how to cure people. During these long periods, she wasn’t allowed to brush her teeth, use deodorant or any products like soap. This was because these energies could interrupt her work with the plants and their teachings. Because of these long periods in isolation, and with the mentorship of her elders, she was able to learn the healing songs of her people, connect to the non-earth world, and help heal psychological and physical illnesses in the people who came to her ceremonies. 

I had the honor of sitting in the presence of this incredible woman. She was so beautiful. As beautiful as an old willow tree. She carried the depths of the vast milky way and wildness and peace of a field of wildflowers all mixed together. When I sat in ceremony with her, I realized she reminded me of my 5 foot 2 grandma. They had the same deep connection to the other world. Seeing things that others couldn’t see. The difference between the two, was the culture they were born into. One was born into a culture who recognized the makings of a young shamaness-the other was born into a culture that had no ecosystem to receive her.

However the similarities are between Laura and my Grandmother, my grandmother was not Peruvian or Shipibo, and I think it’s important to connect us back to her lineage, my lineage, and go back into the old days of Poland, and you guessed it, where elder women in Poland were shamans and medicine women for their communities.

These magical Slavic Shamans, (say that 5 times fast) often skipping generations, were guardians of plant medicine knowledge, seers and holders of spiritual wisdom.

Often in Poland, they were called Whisperers, and the more advanced medicine women in Poland were called Wind Whisperers.

It was common for local communities to seek youth that had magical gifts and sacred abilities that focus on healing, seership, herbalism and relationships with nature. A whole, and in-tact community knew they needed someone like this in order to survive.

This even exists today. It only works though, because the community believes she can help. The community, one at time, go into her house, and she will pray, do her rituals, and help her community heal from all sorts of ailments. From insomnia, to anxiety disorders. From arthritis to allergies.

Check out this video of a local Whispering Witch in Poland: Link

Folks knew which discreet house the Whispering Witches lives in, and the whole community will have gone to see her, rather than going to a doctor.  In these communities, there are deep religious roots, where they have faith in the practices. Wind Witches can heal people where doctors have fallen short. This whole system only changed when there was an introduction to Christianity in the 10th-14th centuries. Unfortunately there were efforts to persecute medicine women, and the practices were nearly wiped out.

This suppression of women’s gifts, followed my grandmother all the way to 1960’s upstate New York, where I believe a medicine woman was born, but had no culture or mentor to teach her. 

My Grandmother Jane, smiling in the company of her sister in the nursing home she lived in.

In many traditional shamanic cultures like in Siberia, the Amazon or Africa, when a young person started seeing visions, or acting in a particular way, the community would often respond with: ‘The spirits are calling you.’ And the child would be taken to an elder shaman to show the child how to navigate the invisible world safely.

Unfortunately, in our modern culture, seeing visions, hearing voices or having ‘intense emotional experiences’ are called, crazy. Some westerners call it psychosis or pathologize and reject our lived experiences in our modern culture. They say you ‘made it up’ or you are taken to a hospital where you are diagnosed with a mental illness. 

Let’s talk a little bit more about a documentary that supports my philosophy: Phil Borges, is the documentary maker of the Crazywise documentary. 

Crazywise is a film where he interviews both traditional shamans and western psychiatric patients, and shows the similarities in the experiences of young shamans in traditional cultures and those that have ‘psychotic experiences’ in modern westernized countries. The difference is, is that there was an ecosystem and a cultural lineage in place for the young shamans to land in, (such as mentors, ceremonies, rites of passage) whereas in the west, we only had pathologization, medication, psych-wards and shock therapy.

In many indigenous cultures, the community will often see a young person who shows signs of hearing voices, having visions, or intense emotional experiences as the process of a shaman in the making. There are usually rites of passage that a young person would have to pass through, such as vision quests, plant medicine ceremonies, sweat lodges, piercing rituals, or learning instruments or songs in a precise way. This was done so the psyche is properly initiated. 

Rites of passage are an experience where a young person passes through something intense and safely ‘crosses over’ into their power without losing themselves in it. I believe my grandmother had access to powers and other realms that didn’t have a place in our modern cultural ecosystem.

I see the ways in which my grandmother’s experiences were rejected, and the emotional and psychic material moving through her didn’t have a place to land, and her psychosis became harmful to her family.

Psychiatrist Carl Jung says a psychotic break could be a flood of the collective unconscious trying to heal itself through dreams or visions.

He has a quote that says,

‘A schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which a mystic or shaman swims with delight.’

The schizophrenic never learned how to swim.

In tact indigenous groups and cultures teach the young shaman or mystic,’how to swim.’

Shamans and Medicine Women learn to swim in delight, where the schizophrenic is still drowning.

Sometimes, when Jane was having a manic episode, she would begin to frantically ‘clean the house.’ There was an energy to the air, like a change in seasons. Everyone knew she was about to change. She would wear lipstick, and take everything out of the drawers, putting different things here and there.

She threatened to do obscene things, threatening the physical and mental safety of her children, and was not in right relationship with reality at all. She was in another reality.

I have been curious about this reality for a long time. The only answers I found to help me complete this picture are from authors Carl Jung and Eric Godsey. They believe that psychosis and extreme emotional states like someone experiences with bipolar disorder, aren’t just random emotional states.

They see them as the unconscious trying to heal itself. 

I can’t speak for my mother, but I know from their stories that living with a mother who has bipolar and schizophrenia was tremendously difficult and sometimes fear inducing. Imagine if my grandmother had an ecosystem where she was supported to help others, as many cultures, tribes and religions have done in the past? Who could have she become if she learned how to swim in these psychic waters?

Carl Jung also speaks about how many folks who experience psychosis have powerful archetypes moving through them.

I didn’t know what the word was when I first encountered it, but we all know archetypes.

When I say the word ‘king’ or ‘warrior’ or ‘witch’ you have an image that pops into your brain with a certain story or feeling around it. These are archetypes, and they carry immense power. The Great Mother is one archetype many folks with schizophrenia experience. 

Shaman or mystic are other archetypes that those with psychosis could embody or act out. Either in the positive, or negative. I believe those with schizophrenia are merely acting out the negative side of the shaman or mystic archetype. Check out these pieces of art. The one on the top was was created by a schizophrenic.  The other was made by someone in an ayahuasca ceremony facilitated by a shaman. Similar psychic worlds. One is orderly, one is ‘disordered’. One is the negative expression, and one is the positive. Artists names in the references section.

Made by an artist living with Schizophrenia

Art made by someone who sat in an ayahuasca ceremony with a Shaman

An image of Mother Mary appearing on a roof in Egypt. Reference: Reddit. (2023, July 17). 2 real pictures of the Marian apparition in Egypt [Online forum post]. Reddit. Reddit post

When I think about my grandmothers archetypes, she embodied the shadow side of the mystic/shaman, and the shadow side of the mother. She was unable to individuate or separate herself from these archetypes that ran her life, so she often found herself between swings of depression and mania, visions and psychotic breaks.

Some of these visions included my Grandmother seeing Mother Mary in plain sight. And sometimes Mary would appear on the roof of that two story white house. This is not a phenomenon only known to my grandmother. There are also many books on Marion Apparations, and in every culture, everyone knows ‘Our Lady’ in some way shape or form.

What if that two story white house could have been the house of a medicine woman? A house where the great mother supported the healings of her community? What would that house have looked like or felt like for my mother growing up? And for me, her granddaughter? Could I have learned from her? It’s so unfortunate that there was such a separation from her ancestors, who traveled by boat during World War 1, and landed in Ellis Island, New York, only to travel upstate for more hardship and resilient times.

Whether you believe my grandmother just saw a schizophrenic vision or the real consciousness of Mary appeared, the archetype of the Great Mother wove herself into to my grandmother’s psyche and she didn’t know what to do with it, nor did her culture, family or community. As we’ve come to understand, it seems that the Great Mother appears to those in time of strife or need.

And just what was my grandmother’s vision of Mother Mary about? The collective unconscious at that time (in the 1950s-1970s) had been through two world wars and needed some serious mothering, unconditional love, acceptance, nourishment.

Her family was poor and there was a lot of hardship in her surrounding community. It needed the light and loving side of the mother. I believe the Great Mother came to her, because her soul could help her community, if it had the proper support and ecosystem for it. Our culture, is spiritually sick-and the archetype of the positive mother wants to love and help heal. Like the medicine women in Poland, or the Shipibo Shamaness in Peru.

Unfortunately, my grandmother didn’t live in such a culture or time period where she could form a proper relationship with the goddess, in order to help and serve people, or be the medicine woman her community and family needed.

In conclusion, my grandmother still had a rich psychic life. Her soul and spirit were kept alive by Polish traditions like Pierogi and singing ‘Solat’ or Polish happy birthday-and this essay is a redemption essay for her soul. To honor and acknowledge what she could have been or could have grown into, had she been a child in a different country, not been severed from her lineage or had been born into a different tribe.  

My grandmother making Pierogis in her home-2010

As I write this to you, this essay is my own way of resolving my lineage’s trauma within myself, and hopefully within my family, and culture.

In conclusion, what I want readers to take away from this essay is that there are deeper roots to mental health, much of what have to do with the psyche, and the ecosystem of our culture and our family of origin. I believe, our souls come into our human bodies with gifts, yet we need the proper nourishment in order for them to flourish and grow. The earth creates what is needed, yet not every seed grows.

In Memory of Jane Theresa Barbara (Poplasky) Koscinski: May 6th 1937-August 4th 2020


Resources:

Carpathian shamans, Ukraine, molfar, Polish whisperers & magical rites. (2015, November 8). OCLLCOG. https://oclccog.wordpress.com/2015/11/08/carpathian-shamans-ukraine-molfar-polish-whisperers-magical-rites/

Guardian dragon. (2024). Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/Ayahuasca/comments/18xhvv5/guardian_dragon/

Translating schizophrenia spectrum thinking across media (Part I). (n.d.). Brainz Magazine. https://www.brainzmagazine.com/post/translating-schizophrenia-spectrum-thinking-across-media-part-i

Constructing new realities: Unique vision artists & schizophrenia. (n.d.). Theodore Carter. https://theodorecarter.com/constructing-new-realities-unique-vision-artists-schizophrenia/

Episode 45: Mama Ayahuasca (Part 1) with guest Tlawil Castillo. (n.d.). Breaking Down Patriarchy. https://breakingdownpatriarchy.com/episode-45-mama-ayahuasca-part-1-with-guest-tlawil-castillo/

Facebook group post. (n.d.). Facebook. Retrieved March 17, 2026, from https://www.facebook.com/groups/3625556537551157/posts/7112099065563536/