Mental health and tarot cards

irisa said:

And the major issue with bi-polar is exactly that lack of balance.

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It's only an issue when it's not dealt with or gets out of hand. Balance is relative, and - as I said - in traditional societies diviners are nearly always those considered 'mentally ill' by modern psychiatry.

Forget 'not two bipolar people are the same' - that's a banal statement. No two people are the same, bipolar or not. But a higher-than-average number of bipolar people have deep connections with spirit.

The trouble is that in our society it's stigmatised and systematically medicalised. The idea that - like in traditional societies - there might be better ways of dealing with bipolar people and others who have other forms of mental difference just doesn't enter the crude Western mind. It's one way or no way. And since Western psychiatry doesn't recognise the reality of spirit and of divination, that potential gift is removed from them too.

As long as people who have different ways of experiencing the world from what is considered by spirit-denying psychiatry and our narrow-minded Western society to be the norm are stigmatised and labelled, as long as our society continues to reject them unless they are heavily medicalised into numb conformity, then their gifts will be hard for them to deal with, whether these gifts are genius in poetry, maths, or indeed, divination.

As for 'delusions' - how do we know someone is delusional? Who are we to judge? Some may be but some may really be encountering spirits! For the psychiatrists, it's all the same, because they don't believe in spirits and in the third eye. Wouldn't it be infinitely better to be able to investigate the gifts of their image-making brains (as potential shamans, diviners or other such spiritual intermediaries, for example) rather than label them as mentally incompetent to do something that is traditionally considered to be the province of those with a deep connection to spirit?


The day a psychiatrist decides who should or shouldn't touch tarot cards or become a diviner is the day I'll give up tarot - or go to the barricades. Enough. These people have successfully managed to medicalise 1/3 of the Western population at some point in their lives, and to stigmatise those who might be chosen by the gods as their mouthpiece. There is a good case to medicalise people who are a serious danger to themselves or others (provided the medication doesn't make matters worse!). But those people and their gifts need to be taken seriously, need to be respected for what they bring, not stigmatised for what, in the opinion of the psychiatric paradigm, they suffer from. And we need an end to the arrogance of the psychiatrists and neuroscientists for whom all spirit phenomena are brain glitsches.

Sad sad times we live in.


ETA: I have to add that such gifts need to be properly channelled and their owners trained in their use. That's the whole point of training under a diviner, which is how it's done in traditional societies. In our modern one, I can imagine that a gifted tarot reader and teacher, or some other serious spiritual teacher/shaman/magickal practitioner might take under her/his wing a person labelled 'mentally ill' to investigate their spiritual gifts and teach them how to use them well (which might mean - in their individual case - not reading for themselves when they are depressed; or at all)

Sophie said:

Forget 'no two bipolar people are the same' - that's a banal statement. No two people are the same, bipolar or not.

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Banal it may be - but the OP did ask whether all bi-polar people should be ruled out as readers - which is why the statement was made in the first place. There was a suggestion that there was something about the condition that made them unsuitable.

No single class of people should even be ruled out of anything, as you say (well, unless you are one who feels strongly about single sex public toilets ) - everyone is indeed different.

Point taken, Gregory


There are more bad tarot readers (in the sense of inaccurate and not making sense) than good tarot readers. It's just a fact of divination; just as there are more bad writers or actors or people playing musical instruments. Many readers just waffle and if they hit a correct note, it's a fluke. It stands to reason that among those bad readers, some will be bipolar or schizophrenic or have other labels stuck to them (e.g. diabetic: hey! here's a question: should a diabetic be allowed to read tarot? After all they have big mood swings!) I'd be ready to bet that there are fewer bad readers among those who are bipolar and schizophrenic, because, like it or lump it, their condition often gives them exceptional gifts, which, when channelled well, are a great blessing to others. The gods don't make mistakes.

Thankfully, even though our society as a whole rejects the reality of spirit and the validity of divination, it allows plenty of freedom for people to pick up a deck of tarot cards, or a flute, or a pen, or pursue a hollywood career, whether they have any talent for their chosen activity or not. In the case of tarot, it's then up to the sitter to be discriminating and say: this reader is accurate and hits right more often than not; or: this reader makes no sense and is just waffling. Nothing else should be of any relevance to a sitter.

Here's a thought.

What about people who go into trance to read ? Is what they see real or hallucinatory ? If you are in the same room with them - it "can't be" real, can it - as if it WERE, you'd also be seeing the strange things they see. So - that makes shamans suspect, no ? They must hallucinate ?

I am reducing to absurdity, Sophie, I know - don't jump on me too hard before you think about what this suggests ! I do realise that what a shaman sees is something else entirely - to those who "get" how it works - but I think it's a fair point. Who is to say what is a hallucination and what is an insight. I sometimes see Flurp (long dead) around the house. Should I stop reading RIGHT NOW ? Or only if you can't see him too ?

gregory said:

Here's a thought.

What about people who go into trance to read ? Is what they see real or hallucinatory ? If you are in the same room with them - it "can't be" real, can it - as if it WERE, you'd also be seeing the strange things they see. So - that makes shamans suspect, no ? They must hallucinate ?

I am reducing to absurdity, Sophie, I know - don't jump on me too hard before you think about what this suggests ! I do realise that what a shaman sees is something else entirely - to those who "get" how it works - but I think it's a fair point. Who is to say what is a hallucination and what is an insight. I sometimes see Flurp (long dead) around the house. Should I stop reading RIGHT NOW ? Or only if you can't see him too ?

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I'm hardly going to jump on you, Gregory, since I agree with you (or maybe I'll jump with joy!). It's what I (tried to) say above, in my diatribe: who is to decide what is hallucination? Unless what you see/hear is telling you to kill the neighbourhood or yourself, then frankly, nobody has the right to judge - or even intervene - and if we were halfway serious about divination, we would listen to what they are saying and consider that it might be a message from spirit/higher self/the gods. Obviously, we need to apply common sense: if such episodes get to the point of the person who is in a trance throwing furniture out of a window, as happened to the son of a family friend, or self-harming, then it's time to restrain them. But I don't think we are talking about this here: rather, we are talking about seeing/hearing things and whether it might be detrimental or beneficial to a reader. One man's delusion is another man's god - a point we see at work in the face-off between militant atheists like Dawkins - author of The God Delusion - and those who have a spiritual connection of some description, be it religious or magickal or other.

It comes down to this mania of pathologising all non-conformity, and denying the reality of spirit and the validity of the shamanic connection or of divination in general. 'Trances' make Western society and the majority of its medical guardians deeply uncomfortable.


I imagine that if the Pythia were operating today, she'd be locked up in a padded cell

Sophie said:

It's what I (tried to) say above, in my diatribe:

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Oh. OK. Then perhaps I was obtuse - or you were abstruse..

gregory said:

Oh. OK. Then perhaps I was obtuse - or you were abstruse..

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Hopefully neither - and you provided an excellent example.

If one were to say a bipolar person could not use tarot cards, one could just as well say they shouldn't watch TV or read books.

There can be effects for better and for worse depending on how used, of that I have no doubt, but that is no different from anything else in the environment.

moderndayruth said:

What Greg and TCO said.

Vision777, what's the reason you are asking this question, general curiosity or something more personal?
Were you read by a person who is diagnosed with bi-polar or its someone you know?
In any case, if they are stable, reading shouldn't be a concern... bear in mind that some of the greatest minds in history suffered from BP and its a two sided coin too (as everything else).
As TCO says, was someone really psychotic - it would be obvious and, let aside all the internet reasearch and second hand experience- no one of us who posted in this thread is a psychiatrist... maybe the person you are referring at should consult theirs, given that they are not a bigot and prejudiced against Tarot.

ETA: crossposted with Thirteen - but, yes, all there!

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I wanted to know about this because i read somewhere that people must be grounded before doing a reading. i figure if a person has a mental disorder could that effect the reading ? i would like to say thanks for all the information everybody provided here.

OK - in THAT case - I for one do NOT specifically ground before a reading; I just get on and do it. So....

Or of course I may just be a rubbish reader..