Supporter Profile – Grant Drake
Dr. Grant Drake has spent a lifetime helping people recover from trauma. He became interested in psychology as an undergraduate, and while at Yale Medical School he decided to go into psychiatry, completing his psychiatric training at the University of Michigan. Starting his career in community mental health, Dr. Drake also spent three years working with veterans at the VA. During this time he treated many PTSD survivors, participating in new concepts of group treatment pioneered at the VA by a University of Michigan psychiatrist.
Dr. Drake has been on the Lost Voices Board of Directors for about six years. Asked about his insight into the process, he said, “Lost Voices presents a very powerful way to help troubled kids. These young boys and girls are frozen in their ability to trust anyone, even themselves. They have trouble opening up to their therapists. In the case of these kids, the traumas are so deep, multiple, and long-term that they are even more frozen. Mike and his teams harness the power of the group, fostering collaboration through music. The musicians collaborate with the kids, and the kids collaborate with each other.”
For the past ten years Dr. Drake has worked part-time with female prisoners at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional facility, including teens previously housed at the Adrian Girls Training School. “The younger girls are especially hard to reach. These kids have many ways of sealing themselves off. They have been abused, neglected, and even trafficked. Their emotions run high. You have to realize that adolescents are naturally narcissistic, and these trauma victims are even more so. They won’t let anyone in.
“In a way, the lives of the kids have become a log jam. There are so many issues, they can’t cope or trust. The Lost Voices process comes to them from an angle different from anything they have experienced. To follow the metaphor, the musicians spend a week riding down the river with the kids, using music and songwriting to break up that log jam of emotions.”
Dr. Drake has witnessed all aspects of Lost Voices at work, and has a professional appreciation for the process. “Mike is a natural coach, and he’s a trauma survivor himself. It takes a special and rare kind of therapist to deal effectively with adolescents, but Mike is somehow able to do that very well. He can reach just about all of these kids. All his life he has used his sense of humor and music for his own survival and healing, and I have to say that humor and music are very powerful tools, especially when it comes to dealing with very deep traumas.”
Asked about what he sees as the future of Lost Voices, Dr. Drake said, “We now know that the brain is much more plastic and adaptive than we used to think. People can change, especially kids. Lost Voices is a preview of the future of rehabilitation, of young people in particular, but also of anybody who has experienced trauma. I’d like to see the Lost Voices model operating world wide, saving the lives of kids who are marginalized, who the community has forgotten about.”
