How a West African shaman helped my schizophrenic son in a way Western medicine couldn’t

After a wonderful summer of fishing and learning to surf, my son, then a 17-year-old junior at a Boston high school, suddenly told me one afternoon, “I don’t know what’s happening; I can’t find my old self again.” Soon after, Franklin had to be hospitalized. The evaluation described an “increase in psychotic symptoms, including paranoid thoughts, command hallucinations telling him to …