PHYSICIAN TRAINING
I bring a medical perspective to the whole picture.
I am trained as a physician, with specialty training in general psychiatry and child and adolescent psychiatry. That background helps me consider psychiatric symptoms in medical, developmental, and personal context.
I try to understand how the pieces fit together before deciding what treatment makes sense.
TREATMENT
I consider medication and psychotherapy as parts of the same treatment.
Medication can be extremely helpful, but prescribing is only one part of psychiatric care. Because I remain involved in both the medical and psychotherapeutic sides of treatment, I can consider them together rather than as separate pieces.
The goal is to understand the problem well enough to use the treatment that fits, be it medication, psychotherapy, both, or neither when appropriate.
DEVELOPMENT
Children, adolescents, and adults require different ways of thinking.
A ten-year-old struggling in school, a sixteen-year-old losing motivation, a young adult having difficulty launching, and a successful professional questioning the direction of life may all describe anxiety, attention problems, or depression. They should not automatically be understood in the same way.
My training allows me to think developmentally and in the context of the person’s stage of life. See Children & Teens and Adults for how that perspective changes care across stages of life.
For more on attention concerns, see ADHD evaluation and treatment
A BROADER PERSPECTIVE
Experience beyond medicine matters too.
Before becoming a physician, I worked in finance in New York, San Francisco, and Sydney, and athletics was an important part of my life. Those experiences shaped how I think about ambition, performance, uncertainty, setbacks, identity, and the tension and tradeoffs between achievement and a meaningful life.
Patients come to psychiatry with lives, not just symptoms. Understanding those lives matters.
INDEPENDENT PRACTICE
A small practice with room for both depth and simplicity.
Some patients need a focused evaluation, medication management, and periodic follow-up. Others need more time to understand longstanding or recurring difficulties.
Keeping my practice small and independent gives me the flexibility to provide either kind of care while preserving continuity over time.
A PLACE TO BEGIN
Every person has a story worth understanding.
A diagnosis can organize symptoms and guide treatment, but a diagnosis is not a person.
I want to understand what happened, what matters, where someone is stuck, and what kind of life they are trying to build so treatment can be correctly selected and effective.