As Brooklyn Minds grows, each new teammate strengthens our ability to serve members of our community. Our staff spotlight series highlights the unique expertise and lived experiences of our newest team members. We recently welcomed Cass Biron, LCSW, to our team as a Psychedelic psychotherapist who will be working closely with our pioneering psychedelics integration team!
Self-proclaimed “nerd forever”, Cass enjoys learning with and on behalf of her clients. Her participation in exploring how entheogens impact the fabric of the mind has brought her to the Brooklyn Minds team, where she now heads our psychedelic integration team. With extensive self-study and over 90 hours of formal training, Cass supports insight and integration for the altered states of consciousness should the client have such experience.
We asked Cass a few questions so our community can get to know her better. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
What led you to become a mental health clinician? When did you know that this was what you wanted to do?
I was in the Peace Corps in Lesotho looking at graduate schools and studying for the LSAT. Then, ironically enough, I received a piece of advice from the professor of my social work course. They told me to start looking for jobs in big cities that I found interesting, and once I hit 100 listings to store them in a folder and circle back to see what the most common educational requirement was among them. I was really torn between law school, counseling, social work and public health. Out of 100 listings I compiled, about 80 of them were for LMSW’s. From there, I shifted course and started looking for graduate schools in New York City. I’d gotten my undergraduate degree in a small town so I figured studying in a big city would show my versatility as a student and as a social worker. Life, opportunities, and interests can send us on unexpected paths. I’ve just followed my interests and my drive to help others and that hasn’t led me astray. Even though this work can be time-consuming, challenging and difficult, I truly love it and that’s how I know this is where I’m meant to be.
What led you to Brooklyn Minds?
Earlier this year I was working at IHI (Institute for Human Identity,) which is one of the first-ever mental health clinics geared specifically towards LGBTQIA+ populations. Over the course of last year, I had done a fair amount of coursework and had also read somewhere around 10 books on psychedelics and mental health, so I was really pursuing career growth in that area specifically. I’d been sharing this interest and knowledge with some of my friends and one of them actually shared the Brooklyn Minds job listing with me for a therapist position and Psychedelic Integration Team lead role. My friend knew this would be a position I’d be well suited for, and a unique opportunity as well so the next morning I sent my materials and here we are! I wasn’t even looking, but I’m glad the role found me.
What are some of the biggest misconceptions about psychedelic substances society holds? How does your clinical work challenge those?
Unfortunately we don’t have enough room in a staff spotlight blog post to tackle the war on drugs and the harm it’s caused, but that’s definitely an element that’s at play here. The propaganda and misinformation around psychedelics and other substances are a huge elephant in the room that needs to be addressed.
As far as my clinical work is concerned, I try to push back against the concept of dreams being “not real” even though they impact the psyche. The same goes for any sort of journey taken in an altered state of consciousness. If you are able to instead accept these experiences as real and meaningful, you are able to use that content and explore with your clients how they have made meaning of it, and aid them in understanding it based on your relationship with the client. If COVID has taught us anything, it’s that we shape our own realities and we cope with these realities in many different ways. Humans are very complex creatures and psychedelics integrate that more. My super nerdy hope is that psychedelics will help us integrate more “Western” but also ancestral and spiritual knowledge together. My hope is that psychedelics bring these schools of thought together. I think, particularly in the West and even more so in the United States, there is such a harsh division between spirituality and science. Folks like Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein pushed back on this and said spirituality and science were in many ways one in the same. Mental health advocates have always known this, we’ve always talked about the “spiritual self,” and incorporating client’s religions and how they make meaning of the world into treatment. It’s extremely exciting to see so-called “Western, white-jacket” psychiatrists on board with the psychedelics movement. It helps us to honor the diversity of the human experience. We’re not just discovering these approaches now. The knowledge has been there, from cave paintings depicting worship of psychedelic mushrooms, this is just a return to our ancestral roots.
Is there any one experience, or type of experience, you’ve had in your career that stands out as particularly meaningful to you?
This is a tough one to answer because I’ve had so many valuable experiences. Working with kids in the foster system, there were so many experiences where I felt I understood, on a cellular level, that there is so much healing in creativity, playful expression, and the freedom to be yourself. As cheesy as it might sound, it’s true. Growing up with an eccentric mom and adopted siblings from all over the world instilled in me a love of play and performance. I really credit those experiences in the enjoyment of the work I do and my ability to meet my clients where they are.
Another specific moment that I talk about a lot is when I was co-running a safe house for sex-trafficking survivors while reading several books on trauma and the body. This had me thinking on how I could bring the concept of “mindful movement” and kinetic meditation to the women in my house who had experienced severe trauma. Through talking to one of the women in my house who ran a brothel out of the Bronx predominately staffed by trans women, I learned that at the end of the day she would have her staff do really intense in-depth hip stretches and deep breathing. Here I was, reading all these books written by men in white-coats in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s studying the psoas muscle and how it’s linked to trauma, and here she was having never read any of this and yet she knew it was good for the women in her house. I remember this was the moment it hit me that intuition and the body were the ways we were going to heal. As clinicians, we need to trust people’s own intuition and their own experiences of their bodies. That’s how we help them get better. I could read endlessly, but if I don’t listen to my clients, I’m not learning. That really shifted how I worked and got me into studying somatics and breathwork, meditation and different states of consciousness.
Anything else that’s particularly important to you that you’d like our community to know?
One thing that particularly stands out to me about the Psychedelics Integration Program that we are pioneering is that everyone involved is thinking relentlessly about how we incorporate indigenous knowledge into the psychedelic space. We’re definitely taking cues from MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) who have been leading the field in advocacy work for 40+ years. Not long ago, if anyone was undergoing any sort of plant-based substance treatment both people in the room needed to be licensed. Because of MAPS’ hard work, that number has been reduced to one which allows the second person present to be a clergy person, for example. It creates an opening for alternate schools of thought and training, like shamans or other indigenous practitioners who have been denied access to these spaces for a myriad of reasons.
I’m extremely motivated, as we’re building the psychedelic team, to incorporate BIPOC providers, underground providers, indigenous wisdom so that we are sharing knowledge as well as sharing the platform. We’ll be working and tweaking the program as we go along, which makes sense since this is a new space for many practices, but I’m going into it making sure we’re always paying mind to sharing that space with voices that have been marginalized as well as the safety and credibility of all parties involved.
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