 A very warm welcome on behalf of Maristan which we're going to tell you a little bit about today inshallah and a great thanks to the MCC, East Bay, our host, inshallah for having this open house. Inshallah tonight I'm really excited to tell you about this non-profit organization that we have worked very hard to build alhamdulillah as a community in this last year and a half. We'll share with you a little bit about the background, why what inspired us to do this work, then we will talk a little bit about the logistics, what exactly does Maristan offer to the community and then each of our therapists will spend a little bit of time introducing themselves and also talking a little bit about the topic for tonight which is myth busting relating to therapy inshallah. So that is our plan for this evening before Aisha comes in and then after Aisha we'll stick around as a team to have some questions and discussion with anybody who would like to have some one-on-one discussions inshallah. So with that inshallah we'll begin. I'm going to start inshallah, I'm going to take us back into a little bit of history and I'll tell you that two weeks ago today I was in Turkey in Istanbul, Turkey actually the name has changed alhamdulillah and it was doing some field research. Some of you may know that I have a lab at Stanford University called the Muslim mental health and Islamic psychology lab and of the many things that we do in this lab one of the main things we research are the historical Islamic understandings of mental health and psychology. Al-Munefs or the study of the self, the word psychology if you break down its Greek origins, psyche means the self or the spirit. Logia means the study of so really the original understanding of psychology was also al-Munefs the study of the self. For me there's a long story that we don't have time to get into today of how it is I even got into this field and how it is that I was very curious what did the early Muslims have to say related to the field of psychology. I grew up in a community that largely did not welcome psychology very much felt that this was a Western concept that had nothing to do with us Muslims and there was really no discussion about what was the Muslim heritage related to this field. Long story short some of the research and kind of early beginnings of my own work was to pull from the early sources to understand what did the early Muslims talk about related to this field. Did they even? We know that they had advances in medicine, advances in science, advances in the humanities, but did they really talk about psychology? I had never heard anything like this growing up. I don't know if any of you had, but I certainly hadn't. I'd heard about all the other advances. And so that search led to lots of searching within manuscripts, Islamic manuscripts to really understand the early origins. And from that, and this is very important because it has directly something to do with the name of our organization, inshallah, and what inspires us what I found was a beautiful and it was a long journey but a beautiful one in which I found our early scholars not only discussed the concept that today we call psychology, but they were so advanced in this topic. They wrote extensively from multiple disciplines, not just for medicine like today psychology is typically housed in the sciences, in the medical sciences. Whereas our scholars talked about medicine and the sciences and biology and all the rest of it, but they also talked about from a theological perspective. They also spoke about it from a perspective of the soul or purification of the self and all of these disciplines came together to form the field that they called anyone nefs or the study of the self. And so the Islamic understanding is very holistic. It talks about mind, body, and soul and many times people will talk about today modern psychology has lost its soul. Honestly, we focus so much on what we can see under an fMRI machine and point to and talk about hormones and biology and we no longer talk about the actual soul that sometimes need purification. And so long story short, all of this theory that I read, which is very important, led me to the next question. If they had, if the early scholars had all this theory, what did they do with it? Did they build anything meaningful with it? Did they develop therapies and treatments? Or did they just theoretically write about it? The beautiful thing about our scholars is that, and this is, I love the saying, the English saying, the proof is in the pudding. If you really want to know if something that's theoretical actually holds its weight, you have to taste the pudding and see if the recipe actually makes a good pudding. So their theory, their recipes, if you will, made a wonderful thing because they developed something called the Matastans. What are the Matastans? The longer term is called bimadistan. Now, those of you who speak Farsi or speak Urdu know that the word bimad means a sick person. Stan is the location of. In Arabic, darushifa, right? Same concept, the location or place of what? Healing. These were healing institutions, the early Islamic hospitals. What was amazing to me is the Greeks and the Romans that came before the Muslims did not have hospitals like this. They had centers where they brought in people who were sick. And they also sent people who were sick, if you will, to people of religion. But they didn't have this holistic understanding that we today have in the Matastans, that the Muslims had in the Matastans. What did the Muslims do that was unique and different? They talked medicine, actual treatment. They talked therapy, yes, talk therapy. And that's something we're going to talk about today. Was really promoted by the early Muslims. Did you know that? About your own heritage? Subhanallah. I didn't know that either at all. Amazing that was what we discovered and we've written about this in our papers and our research. And thirdly, they created healing institutions. Bimadistans or the Latinized shortened word is matastan. It's a little easier to say in English, matastan. And these matastans went wherever Islam went. Just like anywhere Islam went, you find masjids, places of prayer. You find madrasas, places of Islamic learning. You also find matastans. Everywhere Islam went, this concept went. So whether you're in Morocco or in Spain, whether you're in Egypt or you're in Turkey, whether you're in Bosnia, yes, or Uzbekistan. As far reaches as Islam went, so did the Maristans. Yet we don't know too much about this. And these healing institutions were so unique, and this is what inspired us for the name. They're the first in human history to have inside of their hospitals a section dedicated to the treatment of mental health and psychiatry. The Muslims were the first to have psychiatric treatments in their hospital systems. Way before Europe, way before this caught on anywhere else, it was the Muslims. Why? That's the question that I want as a researcher to figure out what is it. You look at, now we go back to the scholars, you look at their writings and they'll tell you why. They'll quote to you the Hadith of the Prophet ﷺ, in which he talks about if Allah sends down an illness, he also sends its cure. Or it's treatment. There's two narrations. They talk about how Allah is not going to test us with more than we can bear. They talk about in their writings that the thing that inspires them is the fact that the Prophet ﷺ himself set up the first of the Maristans, which is a mobile Maristan, where the wars, the battles went. He had a mobile clinic that went with it to help those who were injured. And then they just became stable institutions and eventually they became standalone psychiatric institutions. I can talk about this for ages and we probably need its own lecture for its own hour. But I wanted to introduce to you the concept, introduce you the name, introduce you what inspired us to call our work, Maristan. Today, inshallah, as I pass the mic, you'll hear from all the rest on my panel here, inshallah, about what, that was the history of the Muslims. How are we reviving it? How are we reviving our heritage? How are we rewriting the narrative? And how are we bringing this to life, inshallah, here in the Bay Area? But my goal is to really revive these Maristans and the concept behind them and bridge it to modern medicine and modern psychology. This is the dream, inshallah. I hope you'll invest with us in this dream, inshallah. And I hope you'll benefit from the services to offer. And inshallah, I'm going to introduce to you my deputy director at Maristan, Sara Mustafavi, inshallah. And she's going to tell you more about what exactly we offer. Barak Allahu Fikr. You can have this, too. Thank you, Dr. Ania. Salamu alaikum. So now that you've had this opportunity to be rooted in what our Islamic heritage and civilization has looked like, I'm here to talk a little bit with you about Maristan's, our Maristan's family tree, and also give you a snapshot of what it looks like today in terms of our programmatic areas and what we offer to the community. And so the idea behind this Maristan was conceived in early 2021. And as you can imagine, it was right in the middle of the pandemic. And there were two organizations, one of which Dr. Ania already mentioned, the Muslim Mental Health and Islamic Psychology Lab at Stanford University, and the Community Advisory Board, which focused on Muslim mental health in the Bay Area community, both of which were directed by Dr. Ania. So there's that common denominator. And all of our board members actually were a part of both of those organizations. So this idea was conceived in early 2021 from these two parent organizations. And the Community Advisory Board was essentially a consortium of different community leaders, community activists, and clinicians who were dedicated to the issue of Muslim mental health in a variety of areas. And just to give you a sense of how diverse that organization was, one of our board members, Dr. Mohammed Rajabali, whom you all know, is a dentist. And then myself, I'm an immigration attorney. And you might ask yourselves, what is an immigration attorney doing here? And what I would say is that my work with asylum clients, with family-based immigration cases and also with domestic violence cases, often intersected with mental health. And so I was continually coming up and realizing that this was a really salient issue for my clients and that they needed someone who linguistically, culturally, and religiously understood their needs in order to get the mental health care that they needed to get the objective that they wanted for their legal case. And then the Stanford lab, as many of you may know, and if you haven't had a chance to take a look at that website, please do, is a world-class research lab that focuses on a number of very fascinating topics, some of which do overlap with what we do at Maristan. And so I'm going to bring up the pandemic again. Sometimes I say, when we were in the middle of the pandemic, well, it hasn't quite ended yet, right? So it was in the first year when we realized that there was such a critical mental health vacuum in the Bay Area. Many of us could feel how acute it was, right? Mental health maybe for the first time, as far as I could see, was taking a real center stage at the national level. And in fact, President Biden recently named a national mental health crisis in this country. So there was a lot going on. For many of us, we were dealing with tests in our marriage. Our children were going through remote learning and were overdosing on screens and were feeling lonely and alienated. And then for many of us in the remote work setting, we were also feeling somewhat disconnected from the rest of the community. And so this made the issue that much stronger for the rest of us. And so a group of us came together and realized, okay, we need to do something about this and help fill that void. And so Maristan was born. And we have a number of programmatic areas in Maristan. I think it's been 16 months, which makes Maristan a toddler right now. So in the 16 months that Maristan's been born, we have a mental health clinic, which we're going to be talking about tonight. And Mona Medani, my colleague, is going to be discussing that. We also have the Muslim Mental Health Initiative, which is at UC Berkeley and also at Stanford University. And I think Mona will also be covering that. And then we've had healing circles and learning circles and a number of workshops and trainings. And so this is the focus of the educational arm. And just to give you kind of a quick reminder, in case you haven't seen our website, it's maristan.org, but here's our mission, grounded in Islamic traditions, those same traditions that Dr. Rania speaks of. Maristan aims to lead in professional clinical care, education, and research in advancing holistic spiritual and mental health wellness for the community. So with the educational arms, we've had so many interesting programs. We started having these pop-up healing circles in which in response to emergent crises around the world, we would have clinicians and leading voices, scholars, and different types of mental health professionals come together and discuss kind of what the impact is for us as a community. So we've talked about crises in Afghanistan, crises in Palestine, spiritual abuse, domestic violence, and race and neglect, just to name a few. We've had learning circles, which are regular programs that kind of are community-focused psycho-educational programs, again, focused on the holistic and mental health needs of the community. And some of the topics we've had are navigating family dynamics during the holidays, the early signs of psychiatric disorders, and black Muslim mental health experiences and wellness. And then finally, we've had a number of trainings and workshops. The topics there that we've covered have been addiction and suicide. And our signature training, which you might have heard of, is called our 500 imam training. Now those 500 imams include sheikhs and ostadas, they include chaplains, they include board members and Islamic school teachers and youth leaders, basically any community gatekeeper that needs to know about suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention. And so partnering again with the Stanford lab, we were able to take their years of research, this 100-page manual, and then digest it and make it accessible for the community ultimately to help save lives. And so we've launched that training. We've already had a winter training, which was a virtual training. We've had a spring training, I'm sorry, a summer training, which just occurred in Minnesota, and we have a few other trainings coming up. Please stay tuned. And I'm going to pass the torch over to Mona to discuss the clinical arms of Maristan, inshallah. It's not often that I get to raise the mic, so that was very exciting. Oh, that's not working. Okay, we'll just leave it right there. Okay. Salam alaikum everybody. I will, my focus for today is to really talk about our clinic, that we did a soft launch for the clinic back in October, and so it's really exciting to come and be here today and talk to the community about where we've come since opening, but also since October where our clinic officially had launched in its soft launch phase. And then I'm going to spend some time talking about our Muslim mental health initiative, where we hold two contracts, both with the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. I'll talk about MMHI first, so the Muslim mental health initiative I'll refer to as MMHI. So I'll start with Berkeley, Berkeley is a contract that's been held for a while actually and Maristan took over the contract. And really what we offer is consultative services to the Muslim student body, and we tie that in with workshops, support groups, and then training for the university staff members, and how to work with Muslim clients, the adverse experiences that Muslims face regarding their faith, sometimes regarding the color of their skin. And it's a really important service in that, inshallah most of us here have gone through college or just about, and so understanding the various transitions that you might face during your college years, either as a first year or a second year, and really even in your last year where you're trying to figure out what's the next step for me in my educational journey or just in life. There's a lot of students who are looking to meet a partner and navigate marriage as a student and really want support in what that looks like, how to approach that conversation with their parents, and that's really a common one. So inhamdulillah through the consultative services we actually offer 24 hours a week to Berkeley, and for the most part those hours are full. And so there's a clear need in our community and amongst specifically our Muslim student body for having these services. And again these are consultative services at Berkeley so they're not therapy but it's important to remember that anything is a gateway to getting actual therapeutic services and consultative services where somebody can come in and say, I'm not really sure if this is something that therapy might help me with. And we're able to say, definitely, so our clinic is up and running and able to take on referrals directly from the university. So they never have to compromise working with a aimless clinician that is a service that we have made. Hamdulillah through tons of work and effort from everybody in the community plays a big part in that we've been able to make that available to the Muslim student body. And then what we do with these consults is the clinicians meet, we meet with the Berkeley kind of team. And we start to develop support groups and workshops for the student body. For example around exams we see a lot of spike in anxiety and there's just a lot of like how do I navigate this time? Maybe I have other stuff going on at home that's really impacting my ability to sit down and study. And so we hold a support group to help navigate the emotions. They're really intimate, people kind of show up and just it's such a beautiful thing to witness because you show up and there's just students and some of them may not even know each other. But everybody's in that room supporting one another. And then we have more workshops that are a little longer and usually have more of an objective. So whereas a support group might just be a place for students to come in and kind of let off their chest workshops. They're more structured and we offer more outcomes for those. And then like I mentioned, we have CAPS training. So CAPS is the center, what does CAPS stand for, Dr. Ray? Counseling and Psychological Association, I shouldn't know that. But so it's a group of clinicians on campus that the university has. And to date the Berkeley system does not have not even one Muslim therapist in their CAPS department. So that makes our services even more necessary on campus for that student body. And so we actually go in and we train the CAPS department on how to work with Muslim clients. And alhamdulillah, Marystand's here, but the need is huge in our community. And so we wanna make sure people have access wherever they go to a clinician. And so please, of course, keep Marystand in your du'as that we continue to grow and are able to kind of expand our clinical team to meet the demand of the Muslim community. And so we also recently, our newest contract was with Stanford University. And so on Stanford, the services changed just a little bit. We actually offer therapy to the Stanford student body. They are not consultative services. And so that was a really exciting switch cuz we saw that for them it was like consult therapy. Ultimately there's a need and we want our students to have that access. And so alhamdulillah, we offer full services to them at eight hours a week, sorry, starting September. And we've already had a contract with them over the last four months. And so it's been, I think ultimately really exciting to see even non-Muslim support this initiative and just have this communal understanding of how important these services are. And so I'll shift gears and kind of talk about our clinic before I hand off to our clinicians here. And so like I said, our clinic soft launched in October. And alhamdulillah, we were able, we focused a lot of our fundraising during Ramadan on fundraising for our clinic and raising funds to officially do a hard launch. And alhamdulillah, with the grace of Allah, and the generosity of the Muslim community, we were able to launch our clinic officially July 1st we launched. And so what does that really mean? It means that we are able to see clients in the state of California. So I say California and it's not because we don't wanna see people elsewhere, we are mandated by state laws and regulatory bodies for our clinicians and where they can practice. So they have to be licensed in the state and registered in that state. And so right now we're in California. So if there is anybody that you know or even yourself personally that is looking for services, so long as you're a resident of California, we can certainly see you. All of our services right now are offered online just given the pandemic and how accessible virtual therapy was for a lot of people, individuals who felt like I could never seek this service. I can't make the time, I'm a mom, I have a really hectic work schedule, have found that tele-therapy is actually very convenient for them. They never had to go out of their way to seek that service, alhamdulillah. And so that's been really fruitful for the community. And inshallah we do hope to have an in-person space as well. We know just clinically sometimes there are specific diagnoses and specific age groups where in-person services are actually going to be a little more beneficial for them. And then I think just in general, again knowing that there's this place as a community to turn around and go to in times of either crisis for you and your family or any loved ones or just sometimes you're at the masjid and you overhear just somebody struggling. And it's important to know who in your community offers what service. And so that's really what we're here to do. I was, I'll say, it's so important to have Muslim clinicians. It's so important that we acknowledge this as a career path for our families and our children. All our clinicians are professional clinicians, right? This is not, they're all trained at top universities, alhamdulillah. They've all graduated with masters or doctorate level degrees. And so it's important to remember that first and foremost, we are offering a professional service. They happen to be Muslim, which is a baraka for us, alhamdulillah, as a community that we can turn to somebody and say, I want these services and I want them rendered by a Muslim. What's really important to remember is we kind of see two types of clients. There's clients who come in and who want actively God to be a part of their treatment plan. Dr. Rania, I take this from her and she says, God-centered people need God-centered treatment. So if Allah plays, for us, as Muslims, if Allah plays a very big role in my life, I can't adapt the secular mindset of, check God at the door and this is a confidential space. It's not confidential from God, right? God's still in therapy with you. And so that treatment plan, it's really important. If you are somebody who wants that, then that is something we can offer. But then we have individuals who come through and they say, I just kind of want the professional service. I don't want the Islamically integrated process. I don't want hadith and quran to come up. I kind of just want to just talk through things first. And then, wallahu alam, as treatment progresses, that might change. And I say that and I had a client call the clinic one time and she said, I'm facing all these issues, blah, blah, blah. And Aid is coming up and I just really want to talk through some things on how to navigate. Sada talked about our navigating family dynamics and that's exactly what she needed support with. Aids coming up, I don't live at home and how do I navigate this very important time of the year for Muslims, but also kind of like check in with myself. And so I said, yeah, you know, totally something that we can talk through and, you know, we started to set up and she paused and she said to me, can I just express how nice it was that I didn't have to tell you what aid was? It was something so simple, you know, it totally skipped my mind and I'm going and I'm typing away and she's like, I didn't have to stop and tell you that. And I want to emphasize that this is important for everybody. I was at a soccer game with, you know, I was watching my husband play soccer two days ago and somebody asked me what I do. And I said, oh, you know, we have this like clinic and this entire organization and she said, I'm Christian and I won't see anybody who's not Christian because it is so important for me that I don't have to sit down and explain parts of my faith to somebody who couldn't be bothered whether religion played a role in my treatment or not. So this is important, not for us. This is important for everybody to have. And so, Alhamdulillah, Mayor San is able to provide that to our Muslim community and inshallah we continue to expand and, you know, just branch out more services. But I really wanted to emphasize the importance of having a place like this that Muslims in crisis and, you know, we'll maybe perhaps talk about the levels of crisis. And Jannah, who's our clinic coordinator and a great friend, she'll talk about, you know, walk everybody through what it looks like on the administrative end and then Saha and Hamid are going to talk about what it looks like on the clinical end as we navigate these services. So with that, inshallah, I'll do a handoff to Saha and inshallah we're happy to answer any questions after. Okay, Assalamu alaikum. My name is Saha Jamshed and I'm a licensed clinical social worker. Can you guys all hear me? Is it on? I don't think it's, is it on? It's on here, let's see if I can fit this right here. Yeah, so I'm a licensed clinical social worker. I've been with Maristan since it's, you know, it's start and prior to that I used to work with Khalil Center and I also work with Nissa for those of you who are familiar with Nissa, which is a domestic violence organization. And so at Maristan I'm a therapist and the modalities that I focus on is basically cognitive behavior therapy, acceptance therapy and also I have been like partially trained with emotional focus therapy which I'm in the process of completing and inshallah by next year, start of next year I'm gonna complete EMDR, inshallah. So yeah, and at Maristan I see individual clients, couples, some couples, children as well as family and yeah, couples too. And so I think I'm supposed to, I was asked to go through an overview of a few myths that exist in our communities when it comes to mental health and I'd say one of the major areas in which there's a lot of misconceptions and that myths is the areas of children, right? How our communities interact with kids as well as also understand kids children's behavior. Oftentimes when parents bring their kids to therapy their initial, their expectation is to, you know, fix him or fix her, their behavioral issues and they want that to be fixed. So basically the myth is that if somebody's, if a child is misbehaving then that means they're a bad child. But in reality when we work with these children there are a lot of underlying issues that exist that doesn't necessarily relate to their character but rather experiences, right? It can be if they have experienced trauma, abuse, sometimes it's parenting, skills that need to be improved and so oftentimes when we work with kids it's not even directly with the child but also involving the parents and working, focusing on their family dynamics. And I think that's really important, you know, for us all especially parents to understand. Another myth that comes up very often is that any mental health issues are a sign of weakness and, you know, that comes up very often. For me at my work as far as working with clients but also family and community members, right? But in reality mental health shouldn't be seen any differently than any physical health issues. But for example if somebody's diagnosed with diabetes there's no stigma, there's no shame, they're not told that, you know, you're not a good enough Muslim, maybe your connection with the law is not great and you need to work on that. But unfortunately with mental health issues that's what usually individuals are told. And so that, you know, kind of keeps them away, creates a gap, a barrier for them to seek mental health services. And in fact individuals who do have mental health issues or challenge with mental health symptoms and seek services and really work to overcome those challenges are actually very strong because sometimes the work that we do in therapy is not easy, right? So we meet with the clients for let's say 15 minutes, 45 minutes and they're having to work through these steps and skills throughout the week and it's really difficult. So it takes a lot of strength and I think it's really important for the community to understand that so that again we don't shame individuals who need mental health services and we support them and encourage them into seeking services. Lastly, if this comes up a lot too where when I come across somebody who I think may benefit from therapy or just generally when the conversation comes up oftentimes their response may be, well I have a lot of friends, I talk to my friends and they're supportive or me and my mom are really close, she provides me a lot of support so I don't need therapy. I think what's unique about actually being in therapy and getting supportive services to a professional is that the approach is very constructive and it's very objective, right? So in a relationship where we're personally involved the emotions get in the way the relationship gets in the way and in fact even as therapists if I have a family member or let's say my daughter or my sister, whoever somebody I know, my friend needs therapy, we're actually not supposed to provide therapy for individuals with tumor and personal relationships because that relationship becomes a barrier and really being able to therapy to be effective. Yeah, and that's all for me. Yeah, and I wanna thank everybody for being here and supporting this cause because this is how again that shame and stigma is removed and yeah, so it just also applies and I'll pass on the mic to Halmet. Sal and Nicole. This is Halmet. I'm marriage and family therapist and my specialty is working especially with couples and families and actually I'm bilingual so I'm speaking forest in English so I'm doing offering service in two languages and so the model that I've trained is emotionally focused therapy which is from the name it's mostly focused on emotion and also like I've experienced working with so many different people and couples especially nor diverse couples, multicultural couples and in Maristan especially working with Muslim couples. So as far as the myth around therapy in our community, I wanna sort of saw covered a lot of aspects of it but I wanna cover about like myths around couple therapy and family therapy which is very important in some ways the way people think about what to expect from therapy, what to expect from couple therapy. Some people which in my experience I've confronted with is that they're thinking like couple therapies isn't the role to tell them whether like if this relationship work or not or this is like if they should divorce or they should like work on the relationship and putting this responsibility on a counselor or they think they would expect this to be told from the therapist that you should like live this relationship or you should do this or for an experience working with premarital couples those who are thinking about whether to marry to this guy or this girl is about like they're coming to the therapy and asking okay if this is a good fit or not can you tell me like if I should marry to this guy or this girl or not and so they're thinking like therapists can tell them whether like they're at a good fit or whether they should live the relationship or they should work on the relationship which is not a position of the therapist with not the responsibility of the therapist not only the therapist shouldn't say about these things but also we believe in humanistic approach that clients are the expert of their work. So we are not expert. We are the one that are helping following the clients and guiding them throughout the process and so although I might as a human being I might have some idea but the client knows better and my role as a therapist is to facilitate the conversation facilitate the guiding and facilitating the communication between the couples to help them to see the things around the relationship in different angle and help them to understand and help them to see their problems in a different way. So that would help them to see like they are they knows better how to deal with their problems if they see the different aspect of their problems and or sometimes like in my experience like especially for those couples that they are like it's kind of like escalation they are coming to therapy and they think like therapists would say like who's fault is it? Like okay tell me about like okay I'm trying to put the blame on the other partner I'm saying like can you tell me like is this like tell him tell him about like what's the problem here in the relationship? Which is I'm saying like I'm not here to help you to see like who's fault is it? Because I don't believe if the relationship is there's a challenge or there's a problem in the relationship it comes from one side. It's the both sided. So it definitely both sided you have some responsibility but that's not the point of therapy. The point of therapy is to identify your pattern and help you to see that pattern and how to stop this pattern and help you guys to get out of this like negative pattern of the relationship. So these are the three myths around couple of therapy which in some people like makes some hesitation to come to therapy because they don't want to be blamed or they don't want to feel like okay they are the problem of the relationship or sometimes they don't want someone else telling them what is good or what is bad and telling them whatever like to stay in a relationship or not. I heard a lot especially from the males of the community with all the respect that they are thinking like okay that person doesn't know about my relationship and how he can tell me what to do. And I'm saying like I'm not in that position. I'm not going to tell you what's good for you towards that and what I'm here to just facilitate your conversation. So this is very important for those who come to therapy even with this understanding with this belief they are trying to make everything fine. They are trying to say like everything's good in a relationship and so while you're in a therapy like this is not what's expected from therapy. Just want to have you like authentic self of you in a therapy. So these are the some myths around couple of therapy but especially like not only in couple of therapy but also in individual therapy is that we are as a therapist we are trying to help you guys to see the things around your issue and to give you a different perspective of your problems. Even this might be vulnerable things to say but even we as a therapist using this service and having a therapist to work on our issues because it's not about knowing the knowledge it's about like seeing the perspectives. It's about like when we get stuck in our problems someone helps us to give us a different perspective of what's going on around these things that we are struggling with. So I hope that's helpful you guys and I hope like this stigma can be removed in our community and all people can get benefit and Alhamdulillah with the hope of Mars on we have this opportunity to offer these services to our community. Thank you. Jenna is gonna join us in administrative side so everybody has kind of this like 360 view of what to expect when you reach out and tell her where your left one does. Hello, oh, there we go. All right, sorry to come everyone my name is Jenna and I am the clinic coordinator here at Maristan. So what that looks like my job description is pretty much all of the back end logistical admin type of work. So I'm the happy face that answers all of your emails that answers all of the phone calls. Every time we get a appointment request form or we get a call it's not just an automated response. It's a real human being that is reaching out to you and is responding to your questions. It's really important to us that we add that human touch oftentimes when you're kind of signing up through bigger mental health organizations they're gonna get an automated response from a robot who's just like hi so and so here's how much your therapy is gonna be pay me now or we can help you. Like it's a little bit lacking of that sympathy and starting therapy is scary especially if it's your very first time there can be a lot of apprehension a lot of things that you're unsure about or that you're just uncomfortable with because you've never been faced with these types of questions. So it's really important to us that the first point of contact you have is a sympathetic human being who is understanding and who wants to help you and is going to be able to answer any of your questions and kind of just walk you through that process. So that's what I do at Maristan. So I'm gonna just walk you guys through a little bit of what the process looks like of how to actually get an appointment and what you can expect just to help alleviate some of that stress of the unknown of I don't know what this looks like I don't know what the process is. So when you go to our super pretty website Maristan.org you're going to see the option to book an appointment. So once you go through this form it's a really quick easy form that can be done within 10 minutes or less. That just asks for a little bit of your basic information to your name, where you come from and just briefly what you're seeking services for. So kind of under this theme of myth-busting a lot of people get uncomfortable when it comes to the reason for service question and you'll see a lot of people will just put therapy or they'll just put help which is a very normal and understandable reaction to have because it is scary when someone's kind of asking you what you are looking to seek or asking you what kind of reasons for service you have but this is a really good kind of first step into learning to just explore yourself and your feelings and what it is that you're going through because it's really easy on first hand to shut down even when someone's just asking you how you're doing good I'm fine, chill. But when you actually have to give it a little bit of thought of okay what do I actually want out of this? Why am I coming to therapy? What is it that I'm seeking to gain from this type of service? It's a good kind of just prompter to get you to start thinking a little bit deeper. So after you complete that form it comes to my inbox or whoever the clinical coordinator will be at the time and we go through, we read your responses we see which clinician is gonna be best suited to suit your needs. You can choose a specific clinician if you'd like if you've read about them and you see their bio on our website and you just you like their face you like their vibe, you like their bio and it seems like it's something that kind of connects with you or if you're just like I just wanna be seen by whoever has the quickest appointment or whoever's most willing to see me then my next step will be to set you up with one of our fantastic clinicians and then we go through a little bit more of the process. So we'll talk about payment and fees and things like that and that's one thing that Hamdullah Mary Stand really excels at is making mental health services accessible because being traumatized and having a difficult life is accessible and it happens very easily for a lot of us so getting the help that we need should also be very easy and accessible. So we do a lot of work like she was saying with fundraising, partnering with different organizations like MCC which has been super supportive, Hamdullah. So that way we're able to have the funds to provide sliding scale financial aid and fee adjustments for our clients because money should never be a reason why someone isn't able to get the help that they need and it shouldn't be a hindrance for getting the mental health support that anyone is in need of. So we work really hard to make sure that each client has a payment plan that works for them. So part of that process might be filling out a few more forms just kind of getting an idea of where you are financially to make sure that your therapy isn't gonna be a burden for you. This shouldn't be an added stress of how am I gonna pay for this? It's now putting you in the red or anything like that. This should be a service that alleviates a lot of that stress and that is able to provide you with the support that you need. After that, I pretty much hand you over to the clinicians so we'll get you scheduled and another really important part of the process is you have a couple of other forms. There's a lot of just kind of paperwork in the beginning but a lot of these, they call it an intake packet and this is really important because it empowers and informs you as a patient and as a client what your rights are and it also encourages you to learn about more of the process. I remember the very first time that I started seeing a therapist. I didn't really have any of these forms. I just kind of went to her office and she kind of just told me what to do or I thought she was gonna just tell me what to do and I didn't really know that this was a personal process and that this was something that I should and should have been encouraged to take more ownership of. So with these forms, it's really empowering because it allows you to know what your rights are, to know what to expect out of your therapy service and to really understand that it's for you. I really liked what Brother Hamid was saying about a lot of people think that a therapist is just here to tell you what to do, is here to boss you around, is here to shame you into doing things but it's really about the process and the journey that you want to have. If you come to a certain therapy session and you don't wanna talk about something, you don't have to talk about something. If you wanna talk about a particular topic, you can talk about that particular topic. If you wanted to sit there and cry for an hour, you can sit there and cry for an hour. Your therapy journey is supposed to be what is, what's needed for you at that time and obviously your clinician is also gonna hold you accountable, they're not gonna let you just do whatever feels good at that moment because we also have to call each other to our best selves and our best practices but part of all of these forms is kind of just to empower you to seek the help that you need and that's going to be the best for you. So then after you finish with all the annoying paperwork and going back and forth with me for a couple emails, then I leave you in the hands of our clinicians and you are starting your therapy journey from there. And so from here, inshallah, that kind of concludes our kind of like pre-programmed panel. We also, before coming earlier this week, we actually did an Instagram poll with questions and myths that people also held about therapy services or just psychology in general. And so we'll balance between some of the questions that we got online but also wanted to make sure that we addressed our beautiful crowd here today. And so Brother Hamid, if you wanna join us again. I'll kind of start perhaps in the crowd and then we'll kind of bounce back and forth between our audience here as well as kind of the polls and myths that other people had. Dr. Reneard, is there anything you wanna add before we get started? All right, bismillah. So I'm gonna open it up. We might need somebody to walk around with a microphone. Maybe I'll do that. Thank you. Yeah, sure. And you know, actually, yes, that's a great point. Right before we kind of get started with Q&A and some more myth-busting with everybody, I wanted to do a huge shout-out to the Maristan team that is here with us today with Alhamdulillah and the one that is kind of in the background that we won't see. We, Alhamdulillah, have people all over the US joining our team and who have been a part of our team since we were born. But Tasmeer and Dr. Sadiya, if you guys wanted to come up here and just do a brief introduction of yourselves and the work that you guys do at Maristan, we love and appreciate to celebrate you. Salam alaikum, everyone. My name is Tasmeer. I'm currently a graduate student doing my masters in counseling and I was blessed to find Maristan halfway through my first year and mental health is something that I'm super passionate about. I also have a non-profit background, so this kind of like merges both of my passions. But currently with Maristan, I'm just kind of helping them out with their programs. Most recently I was working on the suicide response training that was happening in Minnesota, just doing stuff in the background. And before that I was also just helping out with fundraising throughout Ramadan. So I'm just here in the back trying to contribute to the success of the organization. Salam alaikum, everyone. My name's Dr. Sadiya, I guess, or Sadiya Denani. I'm a current psychiatry resident at Stanford. So have finished my medical degree currently training at Stanford in my third year. Long time fan of Dr. Rania, as I'm sure most of you guys are, and so have been following Maristan since it started and inshallah hopefully we'll be seeing more of me on the forefront of Maristan as a clinician to provide psychiatric services, inshallah. Please make dua. Interested in cultural psychiatry, psychiatry, mental health, psychodynamic therapy and CBT. So inshallah hoping to provide that to the community. Thank you both, mashallah. And I just wanna say I'm really excited to that one thing we actually didn't mention but Dr. Sadiya mentioned is that in terms of that we're formalizing a relationship between Stanford University and Maristan beyond our student mental health, our MMHI program in which our counselors go to Stanford and offer the care. We're also forming a relationship in which our Stanford trainees and residents like Dr. Sadiya come to Maristan to offer care which will be really wonderful because it'll be a rotating training opportunity for those who are at Stanford doing their advanced training in psychiatry to be able to come through and be supervised under myself in order to learn the ropes of how to do this work with the Muslim community and then inshallah become their own full-fledged clinicians in time. So Maristan has a very close relationship with a couple of different places. One of them is the lab, the Stanford Muslim and Health and Islamic Psychology Lab. We pride ourselves that and Hamdillah all of our work is backed by the research, it's evidence-based, it's solid, it's known and it's definitely grounded in Islamic understandings. We're also very excited that we're having these relationships with wonderful universities and institutions in which we're able to be a training institute where we're able to bring on the next generation of folks that bring them through the training. So with all of this, I hope, and Shala, now we're gonna go back to your questions but I hope you'll keep us in your duaz. You'll continue and thank you for all of you who've contributed and many of you in this crowd and many of you online who have contributed to the opening of the clinic. We couldn't have done it without this community and its generosity. I hope you'll continue to be generous with us inshallah so that we can continue to offer the services and offer them to those who are the most in need in our community and underprivileged in that way to where your support actually allows them to be able to seek out care inshallah ta'ala. And so I hope we'll be able to have a wonderful discussion with you in this Q&A back and forth and for those of you online, I wanna remember that we remember we see you even though we don't see you we kind of know you're there inshallah and you're listening inshallah and so we're gonna take your questions too inshallah. So we'll start with the crowd again. I know there was a sister over here. There's two sisters with questions. Brothers, I wanna see the hands. Yeah, beautiful, inshallah. Should I say lafaa? Okay, assalamu alaikum. My name is Naboo. I wanted first to thank Dr. Rania and her staff for the work you're doing. I feel that we are a blessed community to simply have access to all this. So how, inshallah. And I make dua for your Maristan Company initiative to be a success and for Allah to reward you all and your progenies for the excellent work you're doing. So I do have two quick questions. The first one is how do you measure success in the work we do? What's your criteria for measuring success? And the second question is about confidentiality because some of you are a member of our community. We see you, we know you. You're either our teacher or we know you from here. How can you make us comfortable to know that the type of service we're seeking is remaining confidential and we don't get seen differently because we seeking your service. Jazakallah. Yeah, mashallah. Confidentiality comes up a lot and it came up in the Instagram poll as well. So two birds with one stone. Does anybody wanna start us off? I'd say I can make a comment about confidentiality when it comes to working with individuals that we run across in the Black Masjids and the community. Usually the policy is, and this is something that I talk to my clients about, is that if I see somebody in the masjid, I usually don't approach them and say salam and really it's up to the client if they wanna actually take that initiative and greet me because again, since the community knows that I'm a therapist sometimes there may be that assumption made, right? And I also don't wanna make the client feel uncomfortable by approaching them and recognizing them, right? And also as far as confidentiality, of course all of us as therapists were trained in confidentiality and we do take that very seriously. And so I think oftentimes that concept of, and we're talking to individuals in the community who are not professionals, sometimes they may not really adhere to certain confidentiality rules, right? But when it comes to an actual therapist who's actually trained and that we take that very seriously. And for anyone else? I just wanna add something here that this is the responsibility of the therapist. It is really hard on us as a therapist to keep the confidentiality and not as a sister saw us and not approaching when we see someone in our community. But this is very important in the beginning of the sessions. First session I usually bring up this issue that this might happen, but this is the way I approach to make my client sure that this is, I know my responsibility and I make sure that I'm not gonna break this confidentiality for you because it's very important for me. This is my responsibility and I will definitely take care of it. I'll slightly add, and then Dr. Anya, if you wanna address maybe whatever you wanna add, of course. So Jenna talked a little bit about an intake packet and that's really about knowing your rights and stuff as a client when you come through Maristown Stores and this is actually one of the biggest parts of informed consent and the way you consent to services is us also telling you what are the limitations of your confidentiality and so that's a part of it. There are times where if we're subpoenaed by the law to release records or for whatever reason, I mean there's a few other ones and we won't get into the details, but all of the clinicians who are here are, you know, we're regulated by a law first, right? You tell somebody something in confidence and you know there's that amana that you are not going to jeopardize the trust that that person has put in you. You know, there's Allah there right at the top and then we also have regulatory bodies, right? So Saha and Hamid and all practicing clinicians are mandated by a regulatory body. So breaking confidentiality without like a legal reason to something that does not violate their board of ethics, it jeopardizes their career. Like everything that they practice, if they aren't regulated by a board, their ability to practice is compromised and so there's a lot on the line for a clinician to kind of navigate that and so I want to emphasize that these packets, I know we're used to just scrolling to the bottom, I agree and we just kind of submit and say Bismillah. It's really important to read what you are signing off on. I think one of the hardest things is navigating something when you're in the dark and so all that paperwork is really supposed to alleviate this process of confidentiality is by far the number one question we get. Is anybody gonna know? My mom knows this person in the masjid and she goes on Sunday nights at eight. Are you gonna tell her? No, we're not gonna tell her, right? So it's really, really important to kind of understand that process and so this beautiful question, Jessica Laws sister. So all of you mentioned everything to be said about confidentiality, which I think is really excellent. I can't emphasize enough how serious we take this issue of confidentiality and you heard about regulatory bodies, I think it's really important to know that because all of us are also bound as professionals by these boards of ethics that we adhere to, anybody can have their license, I couldn't think of the word, their license completely pulled from them just by one breach of something like this. So it's very serious for us. It's not something that's the difference between a professional and somebody who's, you know, a wonderful sister or brother in the community who gives nice advice and they'll see her hair in there. We don't, this is not a Nalsiha story for us. This is our profession, our bread, our daily living. Like this is something we take very seriously. The other thing I would like to say is a question you brought up as well, which is would we think of anybody any differently? The reality is all of us need help. All of our families need help. All of our children need help. I don't mean to offend you. I need help, we all need help. And so if you're not gonna look at me any differently, I'm certainly not gonna look at you any differently. Masha'Allah. This is the reality. And if the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that we all really do need help. And there's nobody that needs to look at anybody else differently because of it. And different people struggle at different paces and Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala gives different people different struggles in their lives. He tests people with different things. Some with their health, some with their wealth, some with their knowledge, some with their well-being, some with their this, some with their that. Everybody has a different test and so who are we to judge? Cause we don't know if we're gonna pass our own test Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. So anyway, I hope that helps alleviate that a little bit. I would hope that everybody that you're seeing here and everybody in our extended Maristan family that you met, we are all what I like to say is this concept of humility is what really drives the work that we do. And it's one of the distinguishing factors of the group that you see here today. So please don't ever feel that there will be a sense of judgment by anybody, even if you see them again somewhere in the community, insha'Allah. I'm not too sure now about what you meant by success. Do you wanna tell me what that means? Yeah? Okay, well let's hope insha'Allah that we have to feel from Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala to have success in all of our endeavors. I love that. I had a question regarding maybe providing a bit more detail. Like I think from the professional side of like what your clinicians go through for their like psychiatry degree or like university degree makes sense. Can you provide some detail as to like what Islamic I guess knowledge you guys provide so that it kind of merges together. I know it's probably not like an Al-Ama or Al-Ama course but it might be something that we can like click to and say like oh this is the knowledge that's provided. Sorry for my ignorance. No not at all. I think it's a beautiful question. So I will answer both things if that's okay. I think I heard you say two things which is that what is the actual training? What is the difference which we didn't clarify today? You hear a lot of names. I know when I first entered the field I couldn't tell the difference between what is a counselor, what is a therapist? What is a marriage family person? What is a social worker? There were so many names of different people and different things. These are the important things to understand. There are master levels conditions meaning after they went to college, their bachelor degrees, they went to a two year master's program and then in addition this is where having a master's program as a clinician is different than having a master's program in the humanities let's say or the sciences. If a person is a master's level social worker or a marriage family therapist in addition to their theoretical coursework we did in their graduate school for two years in addition to that they also had to do supervised clinical care and that is about 3,000 hours of supervised clinical care. That in itself takes about three years. So in addition to their master's. So that's about five years after college to even just be able to sit at the board test to take their licensing exam to be a fully licensed independent operating clinician. Now if you're at the doctorate level a psychologist or a psychologist meaning you have a PhD in psychology or a society which is clinical psychology or a physician we won't even get to psychiatrists that's a whole other ball game. We'll get to that one in a minute but the two who are kind of at the doctorate levels that's a five year program in addition to all their supervised hours. So now you're counting all the years it takes to be able to sit in these seats and do this work. We're talking in the seven, eight, nine years of work that people do. Medical school is a whole other ball game for those who are psychiatrists. Of course after college there's the four years of medical school. Then there's the four years of psychiatry residency that's eight right there. And then if you do advanced subspecialty which we call fellowship that's another two years. I personally went through all 10 years of that training. Before you even start your independent clinical practice it's intense to be able to do that work. That's on the what we call in the academy Western psychology and psychiatry. Now your second question was where does Islam come in? Islamic teaching come in. That is something we pride ourselves on in Shala and Maristan is that in addition to all this training we mentioned our therapists are kind of going through weekly didactics meaning weekly trainings that they're getting. One of the books that I helped publish was a book that I hope all of you if you don't have and it's interesting to you if you're interested in the field definitely have this book on your shelf. It's called and you can get it on Amazon. It was published by Rutledge called Introducing Islamically Integrated Psychotherapy or the TIP model. Traditionally Integrated Islamic Psychotherapy. And our therapists are actually covering that model with me on a weekly basis. So we kind of go through that model of how you integrate Islam into the story exactly of therapy and in addition to that they're all recommended to go through their own Islamic teaching. Like you said it's not necessarily an Alim or Alima course but they're all supposed to be filling in the gaps of their Islamic knowledge in their own growth because they know that they're serving the Muslim community and so many of their clients ask that Islam be part of the discussion. So that's essentially kind of, I hope it answers your question of how we bring the two worlds together. I'm gonna take a question from online and then in Shala we'll come back to our crowd. So I really like this question and I'm gonna kind of add something to it that is a myth I've personally heard is oh I've tried this before and it doesn't work. And I'm like how many, you tried it with one therapist? Yeah, I tried it once, 50 minutes, didn't like it. Wasn't my thing, I'm like okay. And so I wanna ask and turn to the clinicians here how would we kind of address that situation where somebody says well I've done this before and I don't like it or I've been doing it and it's starting to wear off and the effects of it are starting to kind of just like fizzle out. How would we kind of respond to somebody who comes forth to your agenda with that? What I wanna say here is that therapy is kind of like a relationship. We call it as a therapeutic relationship. Imagine how hard it is to make a new friend. Like you can try for one, like you have to try and like experience friendship to find a good friend, to find your best friend. So it's all about that therapeutic relationship. So it is really hard to find a good fit. This is not about the experience or the license, like what's kind of license that therapists have, but it's what is important is if I feel connected, if I feel safe with that therapist or not. And it takes like a while to taste like so many different people to find a good fit for you and you shouldn't give up or like just won't try. Even for like, it takes multiple tries to find a good fit. As a, because we have a lot of Muslim therapists, Maristan, we are like three, four practitioners. So what is important is to feel like, like even I prefer like a male therapist, female therapist. I wanna like have like more experienced therapists or not. But when you experience that, you can feel if you feel connected to that person or not. And then after you feel safe, the 50% of the work is that relationship. If you feel connected to that person, that goes like a 50% of the work. And then going through all the techniques, all the process that going through the therapy. Yeah, so maybe I'll add a little bit to that. I remember a while back, I was reading a quote that said finding the right therapist is like buying a new pair of shoes. You have to try on many, you have to try many to find the right fit. And sometimes that is the case. So some of it may be our training and the our experience. And then it can also be the personality if they're able to relate. And as far as the comment about, I tried it, it didn't work or it worked for a while. And then it's not working anymore. Oftentimes with my experience, I find that clients, they may initially, when they're in therapy, they may implement the steps and the techniques and they're very motivated, especially when they are in therapy. And once they stop, because in therapy, we don't want clients to become dependent. So gradually, we decrease the frequency and eventually to end that relationship, hoping that the client will be independent enough to implement the skills on their own. But oftentimes what happens that continues for a while and then the skills are not implemented anymore, right? So when I've worked with clients who say that, it's oftentimes when I ask them, well, are you still like, how was the experience of last time you went to therapy and what did you learn? And I'd say nine out of 10 times when I ask, are you still implementing those skills? They say no. So if you've learned these skills and you have these set of tools and you're not using them anymore, then it's not gonna be effective, right? Therapy's not like magic where you go through it and then it changes your life forever, right? There is continuous hard work and it's a process, it's a lifelong process. Jenna, do you mind taking the microphone to the sister in the back? Salamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Jezakalahu Kharen, may Allah accept the work that you do. I wanted to ask a question from Dr. Ania. So I am wondering about one thing which is not clear for me. Islamically, we are supposed to not talk about other people behind their back, not talk about their private matters, not even talking about gossip but not speak about other people's affairs. But when you go to therapy, you will necessarily have to speak about other people who are involved in your life and who might have hurt you. And you have to say things about them which they don't want other people to know. So where is the boundary, the border of where is our Islamic responsibility towards the other people of not sharing about them and the way it is my right of using that information for healing, I don't know. That's a wonderful question, a very important one. This one comes off and I'm surprised it didn't come up in our myths before because it actually comes up quite often. The question about what happens about the Islamic concept of not speaking of other people or in therapy inadvertently, other people are going to come up in the discussion. How does that go? I want to just be very clear that when we have to understand that when you speak to a therapist, somebody who is a professional, someone who's trained or a physician like myself who does therapy, they are in this, the same concept of the way you go to your physician and you're able to, and if you need to with absolute necessity, you may need to expose a part of your body of yourself. We call this aura, a portion of yourself that is otherwise you would never expose but for the medicinal healing purposes you need to do so. And our teachers of Dean of Spirituality explain that it is the same concept when you go to a healer, someone who it's not a physical aura, but it is an aura basically, a aura otherwise translates into a nakedness essentially or something you don't want exposed or seen by others but you necessarily need to expose that and that may be not a part of the body but here it is a concept or a discussion or something about that person that is essentially a form of aura. But it is done only to the person of knowledge, the person who is trained, the physician, the therapist who is trained to do what? Not to just listen and go, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, that's all the therapist does. What they do is they're going to listen carefully but then they're going to take that knowledge and help and facilitate the healing process because they are a healer. That is what they do. It is not all that different than our Islamic concept of when you talk to somebody the same way you go to your imam or to a sheikh or sheikh or stada or stada and you bring them a complicated manner of your life. Maybe it's very embarrassing. Maybe it's a filthy issue that you don't want other people to know but you need untangled and what does the Qur'an say? Ask the people of knowledge if you do not know and in this situation, the therapist that's giving you the techniques and helping you sort through how to deal with an abusive person in your life, how to deal with a trauma in your life, how to deal with somebody who is narcissistic in your life, how to deal with a difficult childhood that you might have had. How do you deal with any of these things? That is what this person is doing because they're trained to do so and them and only them, again, within the limits of confidentiality and they're given the extent of the knowledge they need just like the physician is given exposed amount of the body that's needed to be able to see and heal it. It's the same concept here. Does that make sense? And so this is our Islamic understanding to the amount needed but only to whom? Person of knowledge, if that makes sense. And I hope that helps kind of help us understand how this all works, inshallah. So one of the myth-busting on the questions was what happens when you expose sins in therapy. So it's a little different question but it's related to what happens about a sin, right? If somebody's coming forward. Actually, this is interesting because we have been working on a new line of research related to substance abuse. And this is probably, there's many, many, many, many sins a person can do but let's just focus on one example. Here's one example. In this line of research that we're working on on substance abuse, which we know is prohibited by Islam, alcohol, drugs, et cetera, but certainly many people have unfortunately fallen into that track. When you come to a therapist who's trained in addiction work, who's trained to help you get through an addiction, whatever that addiction might be, maybe it's substances, maybe it's pornography, maybe it's whatever it may be. It is an incredibly embarrassing thing to bring forward but you can't get rid of it on your own. So again, you're going to the person of knowledge who is trained to help you get through the addiction and with that, you're going to have to reveal that this is something you went through. Not because we sit there and chat about our sins, arudhubada, that's not the point here, but it's the same concept of talking to the person of whom, of knowledge that's actually trained in the concept you're doing. So don't hold back, because we see this, I mean I see this with my people I work with all the time, they'll kind of like, there will be several sessions and maybe finally they'll say, actually, the reason I'm actually here is, x, y, and z. But that's okay, because they have to get comfortable a little bit to kind of get to that point. But if you kind of let all the sessions go and you never actually reveal what it is you need the help with, you're a therapist, shrink, they're not a mind reader. Plus that myth, a lot of people are like, oh, you're analyzing me, you can read my mind. No, I really cannot read your mind, masha'Allah. I do need you to bring forward what it is that you need help with so that I can help you through it. So I hope that helps a little bit too, insha'Allah. Is there anybody in the audience who had a question, the brother? Okay, insha'Allah. Assalamu alaikum, jalla kallahu khayron. It seems that this center was long overdue, was necessary, and COVID maybe just brought it to the surface. I had a couple of questions, and I wanted ahead of time to forgive me if you have covered it in your previous meetings. But as an institution, I had a couple of questions if I may just ask you. One is that the relationship that you have as a Maristam? First of all, if you can shed some light regarding the contract you mentioned with Berkeley and Stanford, are they just a contract that you can have access to the student, or is it actually funded contracts? So does it support Maristam? The second question I have, I just go quickly through them so you can answer them and others can have some time. The second question I had was, with the exception of the administrative people in your staff, if the rest of the staff is per-noble or they are also paid staff? The third question I have is, I looked into recently with the Islamic centers around here, it seems that the issue of family issues one of the aspects of therapy is the biggest issue is it seems that the centers are facing, especially in the family issues. And the need for it is really great. And it's one of the greatest challenges that seems all the Islamic centers around here are facing. Is there any program that maybe get these Islamic centers together and do a good push with regard to funding a better or bigger institution for Maristam such as a foundation for the local? The fourth question I had is, you mentioned about your relationship with Stanford and Berkeley with the clinicians. Is this program growing to the point that you can dedicate a spot in the clinic teachings of these institutions such as Stanford UCSF that they can dedicate one specific spot for Maristam and with the theoretical needs or psychiatric needs for Islamic communities? Thank you very much. You're welcome, brother. I'll tackle, inshallah, two of those questions and then we'll kind of maybe, Sarah, you can take on a few. So the contracts with Berkeley and Stanford, there is a monetary exchange. Of course, we wanna be able to compensate our clinicians and so, Alhamdulillah, we are fully capable of doing so. So there is a monetary exchange. We offer, I mentioned previously, so it's eight hours to Stanford a week. And then we offer 24 to the University of California, Berkeley, throughout the academic year and then the hours tend to drop a little bit in the summer just given that there's a lot of travel that students do and so the services seem to drop a little bit in the summer. But there is a monetary exchange. I think that was your question. Regular budget by the University towards the Maristam? Oh, great question. So the Stanford contract is held by the Marikaz, which is, it's an Islamic, yeah, it's a cultural center. So the funding actually comes through the cultural center and that's what pays for this contract. At Berkeley, it's actually funded through the CAHPS department. And so they hold the contract. So at Stanford, it's held by the Marikaz and at Berkeley, it's held by the CAHPS department. Yeah, they are both from the University, yes. If, yeah, sorry if that was your question. And then brother, if you can help me with the last question that you asked, is there a spot for Maristam within that? Yes, Dr. Renier mentioned that there is a close relationship with the clinicians at the psychiatrist department with Stanford. If this relationship is growing, can it be as part of the matching program can dedicate one person if the funding for that matching program can be supported by the community? That's an interesting concept. What I was referring to is within the psychiatry residency program, there are options to be able to do community clinics. There's tracks within, there's research tracks, clinical tracks, and community clinic tracks. So we are a community clinic. And so those who choose to do our public psychiatry or even our community clinic tracks at Stanford, Maristam becomes one of the options for them to come and rotate through to gain that clinical experience. That's what I was referring. Yes, that's good. But if the funding is available and proposed to Stanford or UCSF or anywhere in the US with Maristam leading it, can one allocation be designated for this cause if the funding from the community is being supported? So the student or the residents, that allocation should have that pre-selection. So we can certainly talk about this a bit a lot, but it seems that we're close to Aisha time, so we'll just say that. We're happy to discuss a little bit more. There are some preset rules in place for residency programs, but there may be space for something as you're discussing. We'll talk about it more offline, inshallah. I think it seems, and our Imam is here, so inshallah it's time for Aisha prayers. Is that correct, inshallah? And yes, we said after Aisha prayer, we'll stick around as a panel, inshallah. And we'll take just kind of one-on-one questions. I also just wanted to mention we have our table for Maristam in the back. Please, on your way out, do take a bookmark, a pen, any of our goodies that are on the table, but stay in touch with us, please, and if you scan that QR code, it'll add you to our mailing list so that you're aware of when we do programming. Inshallah, we hope to see you at our upcoming programs, and please do keep us in your du'az. Barakallahu fikum wa salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.