Princess Echelon believes medical providers rarely care enough about their patients’ well-being to get them truly healthy. She would know. She’s been a registered nurse in Detroit for 14 years.
But it’s not just doctors who are the problem. When the police respond to things like mental health crises, with zero compassion or knowledge of how to address the situation holistically, it creates more trauma than solutions. Echelon knows this feeling all too well, also.
On Oct. 12, her son had a mental breakdown and “completely demolished” her garage, smashing the windows. Though he’s never been diagnosed with mental health challenges, Echelon says he’s suffered from depression for decades. She called the police thinking they would hold him for 72 hours until he could calm down, but instead, she alleges, ten officers showed up taunting her son and escalating the situation. The only help they offered was a phone number to a judge to have her son evicted from the home, she says.
“The sergeant on the scene was laughing and smiling and smirking at my son,” she remembers. “My son told them, he said ‘Today is my birthday, I’ve been laid off for a month, and I can't even go and hang out with none of my dudes because my six best friends in life, including my baby brother, were all brutally murdered.’ [Nobody] picked up on that and pulled him over to the porch to sit down and talk to him.”
Echelon is now re-focusing her nursing expertise on trauma healing as part of the worker-owned health co-op Motor City Mobile Wellness (MCMW). The collective is composed of Detroit counselors, chiropractors, therapists, herbalists, and energy workers who are building a wellness alternative outside the frame of capitalism. Co-op members offer services like therapy, reiki sessions, health screenings, and grief counseling on a sliding scale. The group officially launched on Oct. 14 but has previously done pop-ups at community events like the Southwest Festival and D-Town Harvest Festival.
They’re making these services more accessible, but perhaps more importantly, addressing physical, mental, energetic, and spiritual ailments for a more holistic approach to health. This also includes things like tarot readings and sound healing.
“For wellness, healing, mental health, and being OK in this current climate of the world that we live in, it’s not enough to just say, ‘Get a therapist,’” says worker-owner Rachel Thompson, who is also the group’s co-founder. “The spiritual component is important in the same way that the community component is important. We see ourselves as being able to work together on some of the same people and have, what they call in the medical-industrial complexes, a treatment team approach. [It’s] a spiritual calling, community calling, whatever you want to call it other than a capitalistic, ‘We take your money, provide your service, and it’s on you to fix the rest.’”
Thompson is a licensed clinical social worker who provides one-on-one therapy sessions.
Eventually, the group hopes to run a mobile unit to respond to mental health and non-threatening emergencies that Detroiters can call instead of 911, but for now, they are focusing on offering services via their website motorcitymobilewellness.com. Practitioners host sessions either virtually or meet Detroiters where they are in the community. They are working on establishing a healing house at Detroit’s Ohana Gardens.
MCMW’s sliding scale model has four tiers: $25, $75, $111, and $150. The higher tier is to help offset the cost for people who can’t afford to pay a high premium. This way practitioners can still get paid a fair rate while offering low-cost services.
“Holistic services, mental health services, and health services in general are pretty inaccessible, especially for people who don’t have insurance,” Thompson says. “My hope is that there are folks who have higher incomes who are able to pay the higher costs so that way more people can access our services at the lower cost… We have been working for the last year with the Detroit Community Wealth Fund and the Detroit Justice Center, who have their co-op academy to kind of build out this model.”
Echelon guides clients through a 12-page health assessment that looks at blood pressure, work-life balance, nutrition, and physical health. From there she creates a care plan that could involve things like yoga or reiki with other practitioners from the collective.
“I’m a true believer in biofield healing,” Echelon explains. “If you remember Pig-Pen from [Peanuts], he walks around with this dirty aura. A lot of the practitioners in the co-op are engaged in biofield healing where we are able to manipulate that energy... I use Pig-Pen as an example because you can visibly see his aura and that’s how [real] people are.”
She explains further, “You can walk into a room and you can pick up on negative energy. You can pick up on who’s the Debbie downer or things like that. So we just try to heal people from the inside out naturally and in a way that the person is able to continue healing and treating themselves.”
Echelon also accompanies people on doctor’s visits to advocate for them when they feel uncomfortable asking questions or asserting their preferences.
Echelon isn’t the only one in the group to have a distressing encounter with the police. Thompson’s daughter’s death in June of 2020 was the impetus for her co-founding the group. When she called an ambulance for help, she says she was met with a heavy police presence who arrived before EMTs and showed no empathy for her loss. Following the traumatizing experience, Thompson came up with the idea for MCMW at a funeral fire her Indigenous neighbors lit for her daughter.
“This conversation started about what it would be like to be able to call someone else who could respond in a more holistic way,” she says. “A lot of the people who ended up showing up for me were these healers and organizers — folks who were able to respond to this situation in a little bit more of a compassionate way. We believe we are uniquely suited to show up for these types of crises without escalating any type of violence or death.”
Beyond providing healing services, the MCMW collective also hosts community training sessions for things like auricular acupuncture, CPR, first aid, and nonviolent crisis intervention. These sessions allow Detroiters to provide for each other within their community and advocate for themselves without relying on a corporate health system.
Thompson says they are also building out a Detroit resource guide of trusted doctors, energetic healers, massage therapists, and other practitioners who are safe to seek help from. They hope to have the resource guide available online by January of 2024.
Echelon recently left the corporate medical field because it does not resonate with the healing journey she is on. Instead, she believes that addressing underlying factors like trauma and stress is the path towards true healing.
“Corporate care to me is pseudo care,” she says. “They provide band-aids, but they don’t take the time to teach people you are able and capable of healing yourself. Without the knowledge, consciousness, or awareness people just take medications and never heal.”
For more info on Motor City Mobile Wellness, see motorcitymobilewellness.com.
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