The failure of mainstream medicine to eliminate psychosis is what sends families to seek quack cures, but nowhere do they await their fate with greater trepidation than in Somalia, which has some of the most barbaric treatments ever devised to go along with world-beating rates of schizophrenia.

The West with its shock treatments and lobotomies has nothing to boast about when it comes to helping to cure the mental ills of humanity, but the U.S. isn’t the only place where the single word schizophrenia can wreck lives with the burden of despair.

In Somalia, families have seen treatment abhorrent in any day and age, with loved ones chained to trees or, worse, caged overnight with clawing hyaenas. The story, which I’ve come across in a BBC report, should distress everyone who reads it.

Fortunately, one man, backed by the World Health Organization (WHO), is doing something about it. Abdirahman Ali-Awale, adopting the persona of Dr. Hab, has commandeered the Somali radio waves, offering psychiatric alternatives to beastly practices.

Though he is not a psychiatrist, but rather a nurse who was trained for three months by the WHO in treating mental illness, Ali-Awale is able to bridge the modern and ancient worlds to disabuse many Somalis of the neurotic belief that schizophrenia is a matter of spirit possession and can be clawed out, quite literally.

Belief That Beasts Can See Spirits

“There is a belief in my country that hyaenas can see everything including the evil spirits people think cause mental illness,” Hab explained to the BBC World Service Programme. “So in Mogadishu, you will find hyaenas that have been brought from the bush and families will pay 350 euros ($560) to have their loved one locked in the room overnight with the animal.”

The ad campaign, which explains that psychosis is due to mental illness, is helping to spare people one patient at a time. “We are trying to show people that this is nonsense. People listen to our radio advert and they learn that mental illness is just like any other and needs to be treated with scientific methods.”

Hab’s campaign was inspired by a 2005 incident when he saw a group of female patients who’d turned and run in fright from a crowd of growling youths in the mid-day sun.

The women were alone there. “There was no-one to help them,” he says. “I decided after that I would have to open Somalia’s first mental hospital.”

The Habeb Public Mental Health Hospital in Mogadishu became the first of Hab’s six centers that have treated over 15,000 patients, making it the country’s leading provider of mental health services.

I hesitated to post this story at all. As terrible as insanity is, it’s strangely compelling to think about, but torture in the name of treatment seems so radically extreme that it’s fair to ask who’s sick enough to need a doctor here.

I stumbled on it only after seeing the new Tom Hanks film Captain Phillips. I happen to have a personal connection to the film, being friends with Jim Phillips, the brother of Captain Richard Phillips, so I was clicking around the net looking for more info on what drives Somalis to such desperate acts of piracy.

I learned that, traditionally, families in the Horn of Africa have cared for the mentally ill under the guidance of religious leaders and cultural healers, an arrangement that has broken down in the civil war, drought and famine that has devastated the coastal country. So many Somalis were raped and tortured and starved that trauma-inflamed psychosis has come to define the community.

An unusual number of Somali immigrants to the United States have presented with psychotic disturbances too.

Famine Studies Do Not Bode Well

The problem is set to get worse as war and drought combine to produce famine that drives rates higher. Famine studies elsewhere have shown that children who endure severe malnutrition at a young age or while in the womb are at a higher risk.

Scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing have confirmed WWII Dutch Winter Hunger studies that show that famine nearly doubles rates of schizophrenia.

That’s what happened following the Great Chinese Famine that lasted from 1958 to 1961. Researchers had spotted the same risks studying 1944’s “Hunger Winter,” a 6-month famine around Rotterdam during World War II. Interestingly, the risks to those carried through a famine in utero are highest.

Centuries of famine imposed by the British in Ireland also explains the historically high rates of madness once found there. I often wonder if my two sisters have seen the epigenetic effects manifested in schizophrenia in the downstream generations.

Can the Somalis eliminate such brutishness? Yes, as Dr. Hab shows.

They could also inhibit the spread of schizophrenia by reducing famine.

It makes perfect sense to me that what takes us out of this world–war, drought, famine–also seems to take us right out of our minds.