Adam Strauss
is a writer and performer based in New York. The New York Times said his autobiographical monologue The Mushroom Cure "mines a great deal of laughter from disabling pain," The Chicago Tribune called it "arrestingly honest and howlingly funny" and gave it 3.5 (out of 4) stars, Michael Pollan called it "brilliant, hilarious and moving," and Time Out New York called it "a true-life tour de force" and named it a Critics' Pick. In addition to the show, Adam speaks about OCD and psychedelics in articles, on podcasts and at conferences.
Sara Gael (she/her)
received her master’s degree in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology at Naropa University. She began working with MAPS in 2012, coordinating psychedelic harm reduction services at festivals and events worldwide with the Zendo Project. She served as the Director of Harm Reduction at MAPS from 2016-2020. Sara continues to train individuals and organizations in psychedelic harm reduction. She is a therapist for the MAPS clinical trials of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD in Boulder. Sara has presented at conferences, universities, and events around the world. She serves as board president at DanceSafe and as the harm reduction advocate on the Denver Psilocybin Mushroom Policy Review panel. Sara believes that developing a comprehensive understanding of psychedelic medicines through research, therapy, and education is essential for the health and well-being of individuals, communities, and the planet.
Tehseen Noorani (he/him)
is an independent researcher in the final stages of a five-year project documenting how the current psychedelic revival can speak to and learn from the histories, practices and testimonies of psychiatric survivor and mad pride communities. This has involved an ethnography of the overground and underground experimentation happening with, (1) psychedelics, including leading qualitative research with the psychedelics research team at Johns Hopkins University, and (2) ‘madness’, including as a long-standing ally of the Hearing Voices Network, and more recent membership of the Hearing The Voice project. Tehseen’s book - planned for publication in 2022 - puts these twinned sites into conversation, locating their joint possibilities within the raced and gendered politics of contemporary drug-taking and spirit-making. He was a core organizer of the free, online 2021 conference, Psychedelics, Madness & Awakening: Harm Reduction and Future Visions, which contains a growing archive of accessible materials at these interfaces.
