Thanks for Coming to Last Night's Fundraiser

What an amazing night! Thanks to all who came out on what turned into a rainy summer night, and thanks to the Front Street Cafe for hosting us in their beautiful space. With a very encouraging turnout of over 100 people, we are considering it a success all around, but most importantly we had a blast and met some super interesting folks with unique perspectives.

HERE’S A VIDEO INTRODUCTION TO OUR AMAZING TEAM FROM THE EVENT:

Meet our team of therapists at the SoundMind Center’s fundraiser on July 17, 2019 in Philadelphia.
Video credit: Lily Sage.

The full transcript is below…

HANNAH MCLANE, MD, MA MPH

We’re the SoundMind Center in West Philadelphia!  We are really excited!

I think that for a lot of us, we come at this work from places of disillusionment with medicine and how psychiatry is practiced and how prevalent PTSD is. Trauma is everywhere!

I met Rick Doblin and encountered this work last summer. He was showing some videos of some of the therapy sessions—and I had been through a couple masters degrees and a couple residencies and I was like, “ I don’t know what the answer is!,” right? I don’t want to just pump meds into people. But you see that something really needs to be done. 

In my neurology residency at Penn I would say maybe thirty percent of people who come in with physical problems actually have underlying trauma that is causing the physical issues. And most neurologists are like “Well that’s boring, get those people out of here!”  But I was like, “Wait! That’s the thing that we need to be treating, right? ” But those patients won’t go to psychiatrists because they think it is physical, and neurologists don’t want to treat them. So I had a whole caseload of patients complaining of things like a ‘numb leg’ or ‘seizures’ that were actually caused by underlying trauma. And I think seeing some of these videos of therapy sessions you realize how powerful this is. That’s what really sold me. Just the ability for this medicine to allow people to not dissociate when they face something that is hard to think about. And we all have hard things to think about, you know? I think that with this therapy the numbers tell you it works - but also seeing the videos of the therapy shows you it works.

In a lot of ways we all know there has to be a better way than how we are doing it. And we are really excited… West Philadelphia is a really complicated place. There’s a lot of trauma. And we’re really hoping to reach people of marginalized populations and we are figuring out how to do that as a team. 

This won’t be covered by insurance until it is FDA approved, which will be hopefully in a few years. And so Expanded Access will hopefully be approved within the next few months and then we all finish training - and hopefully open our doors in the spring. And it is all out-of-pocket. So we are working on doing sliding scales and fundraising and talking about grant writing and how we are going to do this because the more marginalized, the less able to pay, and the less able to hold a job. So we’re really excited about being right in the middle of it. And reaching people that need this, and we would love all the help we could get.

JENNIFER JONES, PHD LCSW

Hi I’m Jennifer Jones and I feel incredibly honored and excited to be a part of this process! I am a Gestalt therapist and Gestalt therapy totally believes that people have what they need in order to heal and that we just need to help people get things out of their way so they can. So MDMA-assisted psychotherapy fits incredibly well with that.

I work in community health care and all I see are people dying around me because of trauma. The reality is that poverty is trauma, racism is trauma, and the people who often are given access to this kind of treatment that could be potentially lifesaving are often people who are not going to be able to afford the care. So, I am just really grateful to Hannah for bringing this to West Philadelphia and I’m really thankful to MAPS for really making a commitment to wanting to treat marginalized folks because I think this is really important.

I certainly hope that when we gather in the future there will be more people of color in this room and people who can talk about seeing the importance of this treatment. So thanks for turning out and we really do need your support because the only way we are going to get this treatment to poor folks is if people who can afford to help out.

MICHELLE JOY, MD

I’m Michelle Joy. I first started working in support of MAPS in college when the Rave Act was going through and there needed activism against this kind of ‘harm promotion’ instead of ‘harm reduction’ act called the Rave Act. Little did I know that fast forward 15 or 20 years later and I would connect with Hannah who lives four houses down from me which we only found out after we started to collaborate, and Bob who is going to live about 2 blocks down. And we are hoping that our center is going to be a couple blocks down. So the feeling of community is really  important I think to all of our mission. Community in different ways. And West Philadelphia is a complicated and amazing place. We really hope to work with live with and serve, to really be in service to the people in our community. Right now all my work is either with veterans or in prisons and jails so I work with trauma every day. I am excited to be able to do as much as I can for the people in our community with this awesome team. 

AISHA MOHAMMED

My name is Aisha, I am a family therapist. I also spend a lot of time advocating for the rights of drug users. So I am really excited about MAPS from a different angle in that at Project Safe, which is one of the organizations that I am involved with. We consider the criminalization of drug use as a form of trauma in that people who are caught up in the criminal justice system because of drug use or drug distribution experience all the trauma that comes with arrest and incarceration. So what is exciting about MAPS is that it is shifting the perception of what is known as an illicit drug as something that can be therapeutic and I think that it is the first step to shifting that perception for other drugs as well.  I feel really privileged to be part of this team and I agree with Jen that I would like to hopefully at the future events see more people of color, more queer people, just people who don’t historically have access to treatment. 

BOB SHER, PHD

Hi, my name is Bob Sher. I’ve got about 15 years experience working in mental health and the last ten doing private practice psychotherapy with people primarily on the autism spectrum. That's the specialty that I work with, and is probably about three quarters of my caseload. I very recently connected with this team, and I’m very excited. I am moving to West Philly, very excited about that too! 

In the last few years I’ve become very interested in the intersection between autism and trauma. And if you if you want to come face to face with the limits of conventional psychopharmacology and conventional psychology, then spend nine or ten hours doing talk therapy with people on the spectrum. They are suffering. And the interesting thing with PTSD and autism is the thing that is causing their suffering is the thing that prevents them from getting the most out of therapy. And so I think that this world that we are all part of now - and the MAPS process - really has a lot of potential. Not just for people on the spectrum but for everybody who is stuck in their pain and their suffering. In a way that could be very quick, relatively painless, and completely life-transforming. So I am very excited about all of this! Thanks.