Expanding Mental Health Access and Purpose-Driven Leadership With Sherry Rais

In this episode, we’re thrilled to introduce Sherry Rais, the dynamic CEO and Cofounder of Enthea, who has dedicated her career to aligning work with purpose. Sherry’s journey is remarkable—she’s spent over a decade consulting with the United Nations and the World Bank on poverty reduction programs across 35 countries, and now she’s leading the charge in expanding access to psychedelic-assisted therapy through Enthea. With a lifelong commitment to service, Sherry’s flashpoints reveal the deep roots of her passion for mental health and her relentless drive to alleviate human suffering. Join us as we dive into her inspiring story, from a lemonade stand at age four to pioneering new frontiers in mental health care.

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Expanding Mental Health Access and Purpose-Driven Leadership With Sherry Rais

It is my honor to introduce to you my guest in this episode, Sherry Rais. She is the CEO and Cofounder of Enthea. She has helped dozens of organizations raise funds, operate according to their mission and values, and implement processes that enhance their overall efficiency. She believes in living and working in alignment with purpose and is currently focused on expanding access to psychedelic-assisted therapy to alleviate human suffering.

Enthea's Mission And Sherry's Background

Enthea is a licensed third-party administrator of health plan benefits with a mission to provide as many people as possible with safe, affordable access to psychedelic therapy. Before this, Sherry consulted for over ten years with the United Nations and the World Bank implementing poverty reduction programs at the national level in over 35 countries. She's currently joining us from England. We never know where she's going to be because she's always traveling. It is truly an honor to welcome you to the show, Sherry.

It is an honor to be here. Thank you for having me. I hope there are marshmallows or hot chocolate for the campfire.

It's in the mail. I think it's so great to be able to have this feeling of the campfire, and it's such a warm experience, but also, it's a place where stories have been told since the beginning of time. I love the idea of bringing people on who are doing amazing things in the world and sharing them with other people. This is what I'm looking forward to learning more about you, but also letting my guests hear about you.

One of the things that we do hear in the show is we reveal who we are through what I call flashpoints. These are points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. I'm going to turn it over to you to share some of those moments that you feel have been important to you in revealing who you are. Share what you're called to share, and we'll pause along the way and see what's showing up.

I feel like I could answer this question all day because I like reminiscing and going into those nostalgic waves. I'll share a few if that's okay.

Yes, please.

Sherry's Personal Journey And Mental Health Focus

One moment starting in childhood was when during the summer, I was four years old and I decided I wanted to do a lemonade stand. I didn't know how to make lemonade, so my grandmother helped with that. Rather than having a physical stand, I was entrepreneurial and I knocked on everyone's door door-to-door selling lemonade. I would then knock again in the afternoon so I'd get them twice. Who's going to say no to a four-year-old at your door with a lemonade?

That was my entire summer holiday that year because it's cheaper than a summer camp. At the end of the summer, my parents were very proud that I had made $500 for a four-year-old. It was a pretty good amount of money. My parents are both immigrants. A very common immigrant story of, “We came here with nothing, so you better make it.” Even at four, they were so excited that they decided to open a bank account for me to put the $500 and teach me the concept of saving.

I exclaimed to them that I didn't want to put the money in the bank account. I want to give it to people that I've seen have less than me. I don't think I had the word for charity at that age, but I articulated that I've seen people in our community who seem to have less, and I want them to have it. That was one of those moments where that was a product of something innate/a combination of seeing service in my parents maybe. That was the first example of knowing that my purpose has a lot to do with service and helping others.

Before we go to the next one, I want to take a moment here because I think it's so cool that you see this little kernel of who you end up becoming through this early moment of childhood. Also, I'm curious. Where did you grow up? Where were you living?

In the suburbs outside of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Thank you for sharing that. We're going to want to know what happens next. What's the next one?

The next one was when I was fifteen, we had an independent school project, and we had to pick a topic of our choice and present to our class some information on this topic on a Bristol board and that was all. At that time, I think you would do that by going to the library and clipping some stuff from magazines or whatever. My project was on homeless people and I decided that I wanted to know what it meant to be homeless in order to do this project.

To be clear, the teacher did not ask me to do this. I lied to my parents and I spent two nights sleeping on the streets of downtown Toronto, not the suburbs with no money pretending to be homeless so I could understand what it felt like. I wanted to talk to as many homeless people as possible, write down their stories, keep a journal, and understand homelessness more like the people, what it meant, and how they got there.

My conclusion from that was that every single person I talked to had some mental health issue. That ignited this passion about mental health, but also this awareness that especially in North America, we just dismiss homelessness like, “It's their problem. It's not our problem.” If someone's homeless in an affluent city like Toronto, they must deserve to be there. I'm not saying I feel this way now, but that's a common thing. Don't give them money. They're going to spend it on drugs or alcohol.

I left being like, “This is not their problem. We failed to help them.” Also, if they want to spend their money on drugs and alcohol, not that that's a good way to spend money. I have so much empathy on why they would want to do that because even at fifteen I'm sure I had some friends in high school that were spending their money on alcohol. It’s not that that's okay either. That shaped my thinking of the systemic problems that lead to these issues around inequity and homelessness.

This is so remarkable. Here you are, a young person at the time too. This is not some anthropological study that you're doing as an adult going into the space and experimenting in this way. Doing this at that age just goes to show that you have a lot of courage, first of all, but you also have a lot of empathy for other people's experiences and wanting to see what is it truly like to be in their shoes.

I think what you shared is powerful because everyone has a choice on how they want to choose to do their things and do what they do with their lives but at the same time, there are things that are out of our choice. Sometimes, we have mental challenges that are part of our experience and we may need help along that journey. I think the key thing is that we can't just ignore that. I mentioned anthropology because I've had a few anthropologists on my show, which have shared with me this idea of listening. Also, not just looking at the surface of the problem, but going beneath the surface, which is exactly what you did. It's wonderful that we shared that. Did that resonate?

Yeah, definitely, and thank you for articulating it in that way. I have one more which was not an isolated event as the previous two, but more broadly speaking, I spent quite a bit of time doing development work in low-income countries. That was a decade that I spent doing that and my goal was to help build programs to reduce poverty. A thing for me from that experience was seeing the interconnectedness between mental health and poverty.

It’s the same thing I saw at fifteen but in a different context at a different scale. It's clear to me like, “You can't eradicate poverty if you don't solve mental health. You can give people money, access to clean water, housing, and internet, and even try to help them get jobs. That'll help a lot of people for sure. I'm a huge proponent of doing all of those things.

You can't eradicate poverty if you don't solve mental health.

Even if you do all of those things, there'll be a segment of the population that will stay in poverty because of their underlying trauma and depression. For me, what stood out from that realization was that, again, going back to the fifteen-year-old me exercise of how much our systems are failing, in this case, I realized how much our traditional approaches to mental health aren't very effective. I'm sure we'll talk more about that.

I think you're right on with that. There's a sense of being able to start to get into the work of understanding the dynamics, which you did. You started to invest time and effort into this. You continue to pull the thread because here you are taking the things you started as a child into a young adult and now going even further to explore this on a more global level and into different places where you could add value. I'd love to hear a little bit about what you study in school. I'm not sure if I missed that.

For undergrad, I did International Development and Psychology at McGill University in Montreal, and then for my Master's, I studied Public Policy and Management at the London School of Economics.

I’m curious because I wanted to know how they aligned with all the things that were unfolding for you. It very much seems like they were great fits in terms of the puzzle. When you got into the work you were doing, tell me more about the steps you were taking. How did you get into some of the things that you're doing?

I guess initially when my work was focused on poverty reduction, it was very much aligned with what I wanted to do. I went to college. I studied International Development. I studied Psychology. I knew from some of these experiences I've shared that I was passionate about mental health. I was also passionate about reducing human suffering and working in underserved communities.

I also felt because I am the daughter of immigrants that I wanted to be on the ground in low-income countries and see if I could make a difference there. It’s not to say that you can't make a difference at home. There's so much you can do anywhere in the world. Even in the richest countries, you can do a lot because there are always gaps. I spent a decade working on something called cash transfers.

That's the idea of giving money directly to the poor often with no strings attached. It’s like universal basic income and it's not a loan or anything like that. The difference between this and universal basic income is if a country doesn't have enough money to give it to everyone, you have to decide who do we give it to and how much do we give. It's not something people completely depend on, but it's enough to give you a booster to get out of poverty.

I worked on initiatives building out programs like that all over South America, Asia, and Africa for a decade. I saw the effectiveness of these programs but I also saw that I was passionate about mental health. As this happens in life, I fell into a niche of being the cash transfer person and not the mental health person. It became very clear to me that when I would go back to countries and look at the impacts and the outcomes of these projects some people weren't getting out of poverty. I started making that connection to mental health and then looking into solutions to solve for mental health.

I love what you shared because oftentimes people go into these projects, these opportunities, and these initiatives and it feels futile after a while. It feels like, “Am I making the right impact? Is the impact making an impact?” I think it's challenging. I loved hearing you share this. Maybe you could share a little bit more of a deeper insight on this as to some of the things you learned about yourself in this journey that had you questioning, “Is this the right thing to be doing?”

I felt I was very lucky and very grateful that I felt like almost throughout the whole journey in that part of my career I was making an impact. I was doing work that was purposeful, fulfilling, and meaningful. I was always grateful that this was so much of what I wanted to be doing. I was missing the mental health component, but it was all of the other things I wanted to be doing. Also, I was seeing the impacts and the projects were very large scale. Everyone's idea of fun is different, but for me, it was fun being on the ground and building. I enjoyed all of it.

I think something I learned about myself towards the end is I have never considered myself creative and towards the end of this part of my journey, I felt like I was doing copy-paste a lot from one country to another of these projects. I knew how to design them and implement them very well so I would get asked to do it in different places.

There was this boredom that came where I was like, “I knew what I was doing was impactful and needed.” At the same time, I was like, “This is less fun for me now that I'm just on repeat.” I feel extremely privileged to even be saying this out loud because again I was so lucky to be doing meaningful, impactful work. It's not like I was ungrateful. It was one thing I noticed that after doing something over and over again, I was searching for something. What else can I do?

I love that you brought that to this conversation because it is something that happens with a lot of amazing people who do great work even when you are making an impact, sometimes you're like, “What else is there? How else could I add value?” As you said, you realize there's maybe some part of it that you are missing, and that's the mental health piece probably that you wanted to get dialed into and see how you could make that difference.

Also, how could you add value in a different way? Even though you're making an amazing impact and the work that you're doing, it was deeply appreciated. Sometimes just changing things up a little bit can still make a very big difference for others and for you. Tell me what happens next as you start to think about the next chapter of your journey.

The Broken State Of Global Mental Health Treatment

I then started to look for ways to address mental health because I was seeing the need for that in my work. I assumed with my Western biases that I would take whatever they were doing in North America. I was like fully immersed. I spent a decade abroad. I only came for Christmas. North America was foreign to me. I was like, “I'll just take whatever they're doing in North America for mental health and I'll figure out how to tweak it and implement it in the countries I'm working in now.”

I was very surprised to see that how we are treating mental health globally is very broken. By that, what I mean is up to 60% of people with mental health conditions are treatment-resistant. Nothing we have will work on them. Anti-depressants or SSRIs, I haven't seen much innovation for several decades. Your parents' generation is probably on lithium and kids today are now still on lithium.

These SSRIs that haven't seen a lot of innovation have a lot of side effects. Up to 57% of people who take them have moderate to severe side effects, and yet they're only very effective for 15% to 30% of people who take them. 70% to 85% of people who take them are not benefiting or having great results. You very rarely hear someone be like, “I was on antidepressants. I took it for two years. It cured my depression. Now, I'm great.”

Unfortunately, it’s not the story. The most common story is, “I tried Lexapro and then I tried Zoloft. I tried Xanax. I had to take this to help with my sleeping. I had to take this to help with my appetite, but then I had no energy.” That's the story you normally hear, “I got fed up, so I just stopped taking them and now I'm sad again.” That was part of what I was seeing. I'm a huge proponent of talk therapy, but even that only goes so far. Data tells us talk therapy is effective for 50% of people who do it, which is great, but counterintuitive because in society we think, “Do therapy and you'll be fine.” However, for half the people, it won't work.

Even for the people it does work for, it's only after 15 to 20 sessions. If you think about the accessibility of that from a time and cost perspective, that's not very accessible. All of this to say that I was banging my head against the wall looking for solutions that were scalable and effective, and then I stumbled upon psychedelic therapy and it told a very different story.

The Potential Of Psychedelic Therapy

I started seeing evidence from reputable organizations like Johns Hopkins, the VA, Imperial College, MAPS, which is now Lykos Therapeutics, and these reputable organizations. The clinical trials show that 65% to 85% of people who do a psychedelic in combination with therapy in a clinical setting no longer have depression anxiety or PTSD at one-year follow-up. There are limited to no side effects.

Also, the substances there are not addictive. Unlike antidepressants or talk therapy, you only do it a handful of times. I was like, “This seems to solve all of the problems. How come when we think of psychedelics though, we think of tripping, hippies, colors, and scary stuff? I was like, “This is your brain on drugs,” and we don't think of them as a medicine.

I went down that rabbit hole of understanding the history behind psychedelic research, the war on drugs, what happened, and the politics of it all. I started to reframe my thinking that maybe these drugs were wrongly classified because they seem to be, when used in the right setting, very powerful medicines. When I became even more convinced of their medicines, I realized that what I want to spend my time doing is helping get people access to these medicines.

Again, with the goal of reducing suffering. I had seen these medicines help people I was close with. In some cases, saved the lives of people I was close with. After seeing them work and seeing all of this data, I was convinced that this shouldn't be something like some secret that if you're lucky, you know the secret too.

You shared so much there, and thank you. It’s a lot to go through, but I think it's also important because there are so many things that when I look at your journey and I look at the way things do play out, I think about the homeless experience that you had early on. Most people would say, “They got themselves there because they deserve to be there,” or they did something wrong and therefore they're homeless but the reality is there's more going on there.

If you have the empathy and the willingness to go below the surface and understand the story deeper, then you can start to see that there's more to be done. There's more that we can do and we can make a difference. That's exactly what you've done here, is you start to think, “Everyone's got a taboo societal understanding of what they think the psychedelic therapy is all about.” These are for the hippies, the washouts or what have you, and therefore it's something to be avoided.

The reality is if we stop the initial assumption and start to dig in and say, “What's the real story here? What is the real difference this can make? How can we get over that taboo?” I think you're the right person to make that happen because you're someone who is willing to go behind the scenes and dig in. Would you agree?

Yes. I completely agree. I couldn't agree more with you.

I think that's what we need sometimes. We need people who are willing to do the work of championing the message, but also being able to ask the right questions in the right forum.

I agree that we need champions to do this work and to desensitize. I am one of many people doing amazing work and definitely, I'm not agreeing with like, “We need me to do this.” There are so many incredible people who are leading the way in doing this work. If I can be of service, then great.

I totally understand that. It’s just like we need a lot of champions and that's what I think is so great to see you as part of this movement. I think that's important. That's why I'm glad you shared what you did. Tell me about Enthea.

I helped create Enthea with the goal of being part of that movement to do this work and to make innovative mental health treatments accessible and affordable. Also, helps destigmatize some of these innovative treatments. The mission of Enthea is to provide safe and affordable access to innovative mental health treatments, starting with ketamine-assisted therapy because that is a legal and FDA-approved medicine.

However, beyond that, anything that could be considered evidence-based and medicines that get to the root cause of trauma, we are in full support of it. If MDMA-assisted therapy gets FDA-approved, then we would create pathways for accessing that. If psilocybin gets approved, we will create pathways for accessing that. We're looking into something right now called stellate ganglion block that has very incredible data on its use for PTSD.

That's why Enthea was created, and our mission and how we do that is by channeling employer funding, at least in the US to employees through benefit plans. I know doesn't sound very sexy, but if you think about it, most people in America get access to healthcare through their insurance and benefit plans. When you get something through insurance, it makes it credible and less taboo. If you have to go to some person underground, which by the way, in the psychedelics-based underground work has been very important.

If you have to go to someone underground, it makes it a lot more taboo and hard to reach. By creating health insurance coverage for these treatments, the goal is to not just make it accessible but also to bring down that stigma. We work with employers and unions all over the country to offer this to employees and we've seen great results.

I come from a background of working in biotech and healthcare in general, and one of the things that people don't understand, especially in a new area like this, is that there is a lot that goes into making things accessible to people and ensuring that they get access to the right types of stuff. You speak about the underground, and I know we are giving a lot of credit to them. Without them, we wouldn't be here being able to talk about this.

I think there's an element of making sure there's a safeguarded quality product that gets into the hands of the right people. That's what ultimately we want to make sure of is that we're not using some unregulated product. That's important. Also, make sure that there are pathways for people to be able to A) Afford it and B) Be able to access it.

That's exactly what we're trying to do and how we're doing that in what we've seen so far. We've built a network of providers that we've vetted and credentialed. We make sure that they uphold and adhere to strong medical policies that we've created and standards of care. We are trying to make sure that when people do have a plan with us when they're accessing a provider, we know it's a good quality provider. We have 153,000 covered lives. When we look at patients after their ketamine treatments with three-month follow-ups, we’ve seen an 86% reduction in PTSD. We see a 67% reduction in anxiety and 65% reduction in depression, and 80% of people are no longer on their antidepressants. It is something unheard of.

That's a remarkable result. I hope you had that on the front of your website.

I need to add it front and center, but if you think about it, the numbers are great, but if you think about the story behind that or what that means for someone who's been suffering and dealing with anxiety or depression for years and years. Maybe they've self-medicated and they've tried all the drugs. They've tried all the therapies, and to have something that gets to the root cause and can finally get you off of the medications can be life-changing.

To have something that gets to the root cause and can finally get you off of the medications can be life-changing.

It’s amazing what you're sharing. I have this desire to maybe shift gears a little bit and talk about what is it that you dream about now. What is the next thing that you'd like to see happen for you personally and what you'd like to see for the world? It’s because I think you're a dreamer. I'd like to see what it is that you'd like to see happen next.

Enthea And The Future

Some people may disagree with me, which is fine because we don't all have to agree in the world but my experience with having a startup, I've helped other startups but this is my first startup. I'm going to say a little bit of a provocative statement is a little bit of a dream killer because at least in my experience I am a dreamer. I have all of these things I want to do in the world, all of these people I want to help and yet I know that in order for Enthea to be successful, or at least successful enough that I can do some other things, I have to be laser-focused. I've trained myself to be like, “At least for now, stop dreaming about those other things.”

Maybe that's a bad idea but that is part of my training for myself because I do get in the clouds and right now I need to be in the dirt and be comfortable in the dirt. Startups are a dream killer is what will go with but I do hope for a world where we have less suffering, and where we break the cycle of intergenerational trauma. Where at the very least people have access to their basic needs. It does kill me. I don't dream about it, but I cry about it that there are still people who don't have enough food and who don't have a roof off of their heads. Given all the resources we have in the world, these are very tragic problems that I think shouldn't exist.

I love that you shared and I'm going to tell you why. It’s because I think there's something about that which is it comes back to something I always say about myself that I'm a road weary optimist. I want to have the ability to think big things and dream big thoughts, but at the same time, it has to be grounded in reality and the things that are happening right now.

When you are trying to operationalize something, you have to sometimes just be like, “This is what I'm doing now, and it's only a chapter of the book. Know that as I dig into this moment, it doesn't define me forever. It just defines me for now.” I think that's okay and just making sure that you also every once in a while you're popping your head out and saying, “Am I still doing what I need to do? What else could I be doing differently that allows me to connect with my overall vision?” I love what you shared. One of the things I'd love to know more about is what are some things you've learned about yourself personally besides the entrepreneurial journey that you want to share. Maybe a lesson that you'd like to share as we come to a close?

The importance of finding something that grounds you and understanding that it can be different for everyone. There's a lot. It's easy to want to conform in society. You mentioned I'm nomadic. I was like, “How do you stay grounded?” Everyone's like, “Don't you need your yoga routine or your this routine or your that routine?” I've learned that it's okay. The things that ground me are not things that ground everyone else, but I have my things.

It’s embracing my introvertedness again or also wanting to conform to society. There was always this point of like, “Maybe I should go to that outing or that event.” I'm very happy not doing any of those things. I get my energy from my alone time. Some people are different. That's something that I've embraced about myself.

Before we started, you mentioned having some of your people on your team going out and doing some of the speaking and things like that. I think that's such a beautiful thing to be able to allow others to step in and take over when you feel like, “I don't have to be out in front always. I don't have to be the one who's doing the extroverted things all the time.” Letting go of that is a powerful thing. It shows a so shows great leadership. I love what you're sharing.

Thank you.

As we come close to the end, I have one last question to ask you. This is a question I ask every guest. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why?

One of them is called Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. It’s a great book into the harsh realities of low-wage work, particularly in the US. The author goes undercover. She works many different minimum wage jobs and sheds light on the struggles faced by millions of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck. Most Americans can't afford a $500 out-of-pocket expense. A majority of Americans have some hospital or healthcare debt.

For me, because I had spent so much of the first part of my career in low-income countries, and in my mind, I was like America and Canada, they've got it all so I figured out like, “Let me just help abroad.” This book impacted my understanding of economic inequality and the daily challenges faced even in North America. She goes into like what life is like when you don't have proper health insurance and when you can't eat nutritious food. That's one book that I think emphasizes the importance of empathy, which you called out as something important to me.

The other is probably one you get all the time because it's a classic. It’s Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I feel like I don't need to explain it, but for those who don't know it, it's a great exploration as humans our capacity to find purpose and its suffering. The author is a Holocaust survivor and he recounts his terrible difficult experiences in concentration camps and how even in those circumstances what helped him get through was to find meaning. For me, one of the things that's important about the way I live my life is with purpose and with intention. Do everything with intention and have an overall purpose.

I love the way you share that. Even if there's a book that's been mentioned in the past, everyone has a little bit of a different take in terms of why it means something to them. I appreciate what you shared. They are both fantastic books. I want to thank you for bringing everything you did into this conversation. There are so many aspects of what you shared that will resonate with people on their own journey of figuring out, “What is it that I'm doing? How am I doing it? How did I do what I do or how am I doing what I'm doing?” You gave some insights as to how to navigate the journey with a lot of empathy and grace. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Thank you, Tony. Thanks again for having me. This was a lot of fun.

Before I let you go, I want to make sure that people know where they can find out more about you and the work you're doing. What's the best place to find you?

You can go to our website Enthea.com. You can email me directly. It might take a week to respond, but I respond. It’s Sherry@Enthea.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Those are the ways. I don't have other social media.

Thanks again, and thanks to the readers for coming on the journey. I know you're leaving very inspired and very much wanting to go out there and make an impact in the world. It also makes a difference in some way, shape, or form. Thanks again.

Thanks, Tony.

 Important Links:

• Enthea

• Nickel and Dimed

• Man's Search for Meaning

• Sherry@Enthea.com 

• LinkedIn – Sherry Rais