Center for Collective Healing

The Center for Collective Healing is a decentralized research institute focused on studying communal approaches to health. The first physical hub exists in partnership with a top American university hospital (tba Feb. 2023). This hub will be the first research institute dedicated specifically to studying social neuroscience approaches to community health and group therapy.

Healing the collective and not just the individual is essential for the future of healthcare. Not only does this approach to care delivery make treatment more affordable, it also has far reaching consequences on the “health” of a community.

As the world continues to polarize we become less capable in our abilities to coordinate as a species to combat our biggest challenges. To face our largest existential threats we need to find effective ways of healing individuals, but also healing the collective conscious.

The Modalities We Use

  • Multimodal languages combine different “modes” of communicating including movement, song, speech, and writing to communicate what might be impossible only through written or spoken word. Can outward expressions of the ephemerality we experience be a bedrock for community?

  • Virtual reality and other immersive technologies that can simulate experiences not possible in the world today. How can gaming transform communities for the better? How do virtual worlds supplement human communication when we’re in lockdown?

  • Cognitive behavioral therapy, talk therapies, community therapy, and traditional family therapy. Using the most accessible modalities available today to push the limits of collective healing and intergroup synchrony.

  • Exploring outside the realm of traditional therapies. Somatic approaches, family systems, neurofeedback, EFT, and therapies yet to be integrated into the average therapists toolkit.

Areas of Research

  • Social Bias & Racial Stress

    Understanding the mechanisms of social bias and racial stress in treating mental health symptoms could go as far as helping us reduce the chance of war in polarized regions. How does integrative group work influence bias, connectedness, and stress when paired with novel therapies?

  • Couples Work & Family Therapy

    Studying long term couples, new couples, and strangers in their relationships can provide us with powerful insights into collective healing. Looking at social connectedness and interbrain synchrony in these different demographics is essential for our understanding of human coexistence. Could improving relationships show enhancements in neural correlates of social connection?

  • Climate & Nature Relatedness

    Can the group format to therapy both enhance connectedness to nature as well as reduce climate apathy and climate anxiety. Studying the group format in and out of naturalistic settings can provide insights into the best environments for increasing nature relatedness in patient populations.

  • Coordination and Problem Solving

    How do polarization and poor intergroup dynamics affect our ability to coordinate and solve our world’s biggest challenges? Can our health systems shift to a model where individual health is one piece of a much larger puzzle and collective healing is our greatest tool against existential threats?

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Measuring Community Attitudes

A center focused on the collective should inform its research through community assessments. For instance, The Energia Foundation is keenly aware of the power of psychedelic therapies and the popularization of Psychedelic Assisted Therapy (PAT) over the last 24 months. While the Center for Collective Healing is interested in exploring modalities as novel as PAT, we first need to understand what community sentiment towards these therapies is.

By working closely with community to structure the direction of our research we can have greater buy-in from patient populations, diversify research participants to gather more robust clinical data, and build greater institutional trust over time.