<i>Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful.</i><p>What if these voices are reflective of the emotional state of the people around them, as this quote suggests?<p>In that case, that is a kind of &quot;magic&quot;, 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.<p>And if this is true, then yes, a shaman would know more about what&#x27;s going on in a person&#x27;s mind than a doctor.<p>If you close your eyes, it doesn&#x27;t mean the world isn&#x27;t real. Just because you can&#x27;t see something with the scientific framework, yet, does not mean it cannot be true.<p>Anyway, I don&#x27;t see what coercion has got to do with shaman&#x27;s in particular. There was plenty of people captured as slaves, in conflicts between prehistoric tribes, and that&#x27;s a lot more coercion happening than in a schizophrenic being picked out as a shaman. There&#x27;s probably less mental illness in prehistoric societies, because people probably didn&#x27;t care much about a slave going crazy, it&#x27;s likely unsurprising that happens, and you just kill them off.<p>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.