EP 117: Why Social Workers Make Great Leaders

07/03/24 • 26 min

Dr. Michael Kaufman, MSW, PhD., author of the new book, Doing Good & Doing Well: Inspiring Helping Professionals to Become Leaders in Their Organizations, has managed countless crises that have needed quick, level-headed thinking and tough decisions delivered with empathy and heart. Board chair of Premier Education Partners he has seen other helping professionals, including social workers, do the same thing. In his book, Dr. Kaufman shares the lessons he has learned throughout his 30-year career and uses anecdotes to illustrate the pointed discussions to inspire social workers by realizing that their specific characteristics, distinct aptitudes, and mindsets as servant leaders have already prepared them to work in the C-Suite.

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EP 116: Psychedelic Assisted Therapy

Mary Cosimano, LMSW, has been with the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research since 2000 when they began research with psilocybin. She is currently a Psychedelic Session Facilitator and has served as Director of Clinical Services and as a research coordinator. She has been involved with all the psilocybin studies and has conducted over 500 study sessions including Club Drug studies with Salvia Divinorum and Dextromethorphan. Mary has trained postdoctoral fellows, faculty, clinicians, and research assistants as guides and taught individual and group meditation to breast cancer patients in a Johns Hopkins research study. She completed MAPS MDMA therapy training program. She is a teacher and mentor at California Institute to Integral Studies for their Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research (CPTR) certificate program and conducts training for therapists in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. Mary is a Psychedelic Harm Reduction and Integration Coach and leads a Death Awareness/Death and Psychedelics Workshop. In 2003 she started a meditation group for employees in her department. She also has 15 years of experience with direct patient care as a hospice volunteer.

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EP 118: Career Pivots — It’s Never Too Late to Become a Therapist

In this NASW podcast episode of Social Work Talks we examine why it’s Never Too Late to enter the field of therapy. Our host NASW member Elisabeth Joy LaMotte, LICSW chats with chef Karey Swartwout, and political organizer and journalist Dr. Brooke Stroud, now a clinical psychologist, and author Daniel Duane (who today is featured in an article in The New York Times). Today, each discusses why they left past careers to enter the profession of therapy. Listen as they discuss why they leapt, later in life, to a field inhabited by many social workers.