A fund ready for donors. The Gnosis House Retreat Fund will establish a residential house in San Francisco or other Bay Area community based on the R.D. Laing model offering sanctuary and community to those seeking to move through mental, emotional and spiritual distress with minimal or no use of medication. The fund seeks to raise $500,000.

Where the problem lies

Places of sanctuary for mental and emotional healing as alternatives to hospitalization and other medicalized approaches to care are scarce and usually prohibitively expensive to all but the very wealthy.

Help is on the way

The Gnosis Retreat Center aspires to be a place of safety and community for those who want to take the necessary time to step back and come to an understanding of themselves and their pain and regain their passion for living.

It will offer a network of fellow travelers who aspire to cultivate skillful means of helping people whose relations with themselves and others have become an occasion of wretchedness and despair. By living together in a perfectly ordinary household with no regimen to follow, we hope to foster a better understanding of how each of us, perhaps unwittingly, sometimes occasion the predicament we are in, by getting to know ourselves and others at the deepest level. Gnosis Retreat Center is not a “treatment” center, but those who choose to live there are encouraged to participate in individual psychotherapy, with whomever they wish, off premises.

Center leadership

FREE ASSOCATION, Inc, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, led by psychotherapists Michael Guy Thompson, Nita Gage, and Matthew Morrissey will use their extensive experience in sanctuary care to create and maintain the healing environment at Gnosis House. Six to eight individuals will be “residents” who pay a fee for living there; two more will be paid live-in staff.

The reason we are able to provide a medication-free (or minimal medication) alternative to treatment facilities is due to our considerable experience of working with this model. Michael Guy Thompson lived in one of Laing’s houses in London while training as a psychoanalyst for four years. Nita Gage lived in one of Laing’s houses for several years while engaged in therapy training. Matthew Morrissey lived in a Laingian house in New Hampshire directed by a former student of Laing’s for a several years. All three are experienced psychotherapists with a exemplary track records. Michael Guy Thompson, the Executive Director of Gnosis Retreat Center, has published extensively and has been training psychotherapists and psychoanalysts in both graduate doctoral programs as well as psychoanalytic institutes for more than thirty-five years. (For a list of Dr. Thompson’s publications and biographical information see his website at: www.mguythompson.com)

Gnosis Retreat Center will be comprised of three part-time directors, two live-in staff, volunteers and interns from local graduate schools. Ongoing training, seminars, lecture presentations and poetry readings will be organized for the local neighborhood. Time isn’t “filled” with rote activities, but devoted to reflecting upon while forming friendships with one another, the key agent for lasting change and recovery. Meditation, yoga, mindfulness exercises, and a healthy diet are provided in order to ease the state of panic and turmoil that our guests are typically struggling with.