Bostonia: Deidra Somerville (SSW’95) Makes Psychedelic Therapy Accessible to Underserved Communities
In an effort to make the same mental health services available to everyone, alum Dierdra Somerville (SSW’95) is improving the accessibility of psychedelic therapy for people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and people with low incomes (less than $28,800 a year) in her role as executive director of the Sage Institute. Her recent interview with Bostonia explores the institute’s mission and how she’s continuing her family’s legacy of mental health equity.
Excerpt from “Making Psychedelic Therapy Accessible to Underserved Communities” by Joel Brown, originally published in Bostonia:
Deidra Somerville believes in healing for all, and she’s followed that work down an uncommon path since last spring as the new executive director of the Sage Institute in Oakland, Calif., which provides accessible psychedelic therapy to underserved communities.
Therapy assisted by psychedelic drugs has been gaining credence in the mental health community in recent years, especially for people with depression or post-traumatic stress.
“It gives a person a chance to unlock a door they may have closed themself off to or that was closed to them,” says Somerville (SSW’95), a Bay Area native. “They can walk through it more safely and with an opportunity for resolution.”
Psychedelic therapy and its trendy cousin, microdosing, have become popular recently, but generally among the well-off, especially those bohemian baby boomers who might remember LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin mushrooms from their adventurous youth.
“I had only seen it in the context of mostly white, wealthy people. It felt a world apart for me, personally,” Somerville says. “It was not a part of any world I belonged to. And a few years ago, I began to see efforts by Black folks to question those white spaces. Why are we absent from them? How do we get access?”