Anesis Therapy Is Hosting a Multicultural Conference on Therapy: Awakening a Need
Myra McNair founded Anesis Therapy in 2016.
by Jonathan Gramling
As Madison’s communities of color have evolved and grown over the last 2-3 decades, so have their mental health needs. In a majority city, while people of color have the same mental health needs as anyone else, there was a reluctance to access services due to cultural difference around mental health.
“There is so much stigma within our communities around mental health,” said Myra McNair, founder of Anesis Therapy. “You don’t want to be the crazy one. Or that’s for crazy people. We’re supposed to be strong and resilient. There are those stereotypes that are not helpful and we put them on ourselves. The scary part is if I tell someone, will my kids be taken away? Will there be consequences? I think there has always been that healthy fear too. Is this even a safe space for me and my family to go to to talk about these kinds of issues.”
And in a world full of stereotypes, there is also the fear of being misunderstood by a profession that had been designed around the needs of white women and men.
“When you are coming in, you’re talking about your families,” McNair said. “You're talking about your culture and neighborhood. There are a lot of cultural nuances that people may not understand. Does someone else have the patience to talk about those things or talk about colorism or all of these things that they may have no idea that even exists. And your trauma is rooted in this concept that someone may even not understand.”
It appeared on the outside that Madison was meeting the mental health needs of people of color through programs operated by Journey Mental Health. But in 2016, McNair founded Anesis Therapy to serve as a hub for mental health professionals of color who would provide culturally-competent mental health services. As the saying goes, “If you build it, they will come.” The demand became so great from people of color that Anesis couldn’t keep up with the demand.
“Our wait list was 800 before we closed it down,” McNair said. “That 800 is self-referral. It’s not our community partners. It’s not referrals from Dane County. That’s all people self-referring. That was closed in January. We receive 5-10 calls a day, inquiries or filling out the online full intake form. We were getting so many complaints at first. ‘We’re not getting calls on where I am on the list.’ You try to explain this to people. ‘There are 800 of you.’ Our office isn’t even big enough to call everyone to tell people, ‘Hey, you’re number 500.’ It’s been interesting. It’s been an interesting journey of navigating this kind of need. We’re not that big based on the need that there is in Madison.”
Anesis has grown from a handful of staff in 2016 to over 60 employees today. And the need has been so great that McNair has had to look for staff beyond Dane County to provide services in the virtual world.
“We have two employees in Texas, one in Iowa and one in Chicago,” McNair said. “They are all servicing our clients in Madison and other places in Wisconsin right now virtually. We have one person who is starting with us who will be in Milwaukee. They will be hybrid, doing some work in Milwaukee in-person and then do virtual work with our clients here in Madison.”
While Anesis is in the helping profession field, it still has to run as a businesses. If you grow too quickly without a solid infrastructure, ithe business can implode from within due to a lack of people and resources in place.
“Health care is a business, whether people like that or not,” McNair said. “It is. You have to make money to pay people. It’s a costly operation. For us, it’s been really hard because most businesses have a growth trajectory and then you level off, but you put a lot of money into growth. But when you are continuing to have these exponential times of growth, you don’t have reserves. You’re just pouring that money into trying to sustain something that almost feels like you can’t attain it. We keep asking ourselves, ‘When are we going to be at a place where we say that is our sweet spot? Let’s level off. We don’t need to do more hiring. We don’t need another office.’ To be, quite honest — even with strategic planning — we still haven’t figured that out.”
That growth has led Anesis to offer services in a variety of mental health areas.
“We have an in-home mental health program,” McNair said. “There is no virtual work. They are all out in the community and they go into people’s homes. They go into schools. And they work with families that have been referred to us from Dane County CPS. Kids are in Child Protective Services for youth justice. It’s all the way from zero to 17-years-old. We have county contracts that cover that because that’s another area that insurance companies do not like to cover.”
And it also has its community programs.
“We have medication services,” McNair said. “We have two psychiatrists plus doctors at two locations with our psychiatry department. We have CCS department that does case management wrap-around services. And we have our in-home family therapy services. We have outpatient, which includes all mental health, AODA, psychiatry and psychotherapy. And we have in-home, which is all in the community. We do CCS wrap-around services. Other subdivision are groupings where we do a drop-in mental health clinic that is free services. You do not need an appointment. You do not need insurance. We have certain time slots available for drop-in clinic. We have one bilingual one. And then we have another one that is located at Mt. Zion Baptist Church. The one that is located here is bilingual. And in the fall, we will be opening up on University Avenue.”
While there is some security knowing that Anesis has an 800 person waiting list, McNair feels the situation is unacceptable because people in need are not getting the services when they need them. Employing therapists from other states to provide services to Madison-area residents is a stop-gap measure. And the supply of therapists of color is not going to dramatically increase overnight.
“The odds of someone seeing someone not of their culture is very high,” McNair said. “So why don’t we talk about educating the next generation of clinicians to be really educated in multicultural considerations and healing practices, not just our issues that come from our communities, but also rituals or things that are really normalized in our culture. People think about yoga all the time and how that is such a stolen practice sometimes. People aren’t aware of its Eastern origins. And I think there are other things outside of yoga that are culturally acceptable in practices. We’re not just going to talk about our issues at this conference. We’re going to talk about cultural ancestral or spiritual things or faith-based things like We can’t just have this European ideology of, ‘I’m just going to treat your mental health. Everything outside of mental health is outside of this room.’ And those things are contributing to the mental health issues.”
And so in order to help make the Madison-area mental health system more culturally relevant, Anesis is hosting a one day conference titled “ Revolutionizing Wellness: The Mental Health Renaissance.” It’s being held on August 22nd at the Madison Marriott Hotel in Middleton.
“We want to educate not just Black and Brown people, but all different clinicians, all mental health practitioners, health care providers, community health care workers, and peer support specialists,” McNair said. “I’m hoping that if we do this conference again and again, that we can have lawmakers in the room. I would love to have insurance companies come to this conference. And I would like to have some kind of advocacy agenda within this conference as well. We’re going to be touching on it a little bit with this conference. But I would like to see that grow, grow, grow as well.”
There are going to be two keynote speeches and 18 break-out sessions during the day. Judge Everett Mitchell will be giving the opening keynote speech and Kim Young will be giving the luncheon keynote speech.
“Kim Young is out of Virginia,” McNair said. “She has a really huge Instagram following. Her name is Dope Black Social Worker on social media. She has a pretty popular podcast called Dope Black Social Worker. She is a huge advocate in Virginia of really changing licensing for teachers and social workers because if you do all the research, it’s showing that Black people are going through their masters degree to get social work degrees, but they can’t pass the licensure test because it’s biased. We’ve been having these problems in Wisconsin as well. Virginia may have just changed that over. She’s been a huge advocate of changing that because it’s not an equitable test.”
The breakout sessions will be conducted by local and nationally-known experts in the mental health field.
“We have Adrienne Hurst who is from Washington, D.C.,” McNair gave as an example. “Her team is called the Overdose Prevention Program - Reimagine Public Health. They are out of New York, Singapore, Paris and Washington, D.C. She researches the state of Wisconsin and Black folks overdose and substance abuse.”
There will be a panel with State Reps Francesca Hong and Shelia Stubbs and Gloria Reyes who will talk about mental health policy and how elected officials can become mental health advocates.
McNair noted that already 300 people have signed up for the conference. They have the capacity to have 500 attendees. McNair is so excited about the potential for the conference that there is already talk for a two-day conference next year.
For more information about Revolutionizing Wellness, visit https://anesistherapycenter.com/conf24.