As a longtime student of both the arts and science, I found a way to merge my interest in both through psychiatry. After studying computer science at Princeton University and Japanese culture during a fellowship in Tokyo, at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, I discovered that I enjoyed the fundamental challenge of psychiatry: trying to understand another person’s experience. Meanwhile, I was drawn to the philosophy of palliative medicine, which emphasizes quality of life and finding meaning, aspects of psychiatry that I worry have waned with the rise of the “15-minute med check.”
My residency at Tufts Medical Center in Boston provided a strong biological education in psychiatry under supervisors like Dr. Nassir Ghaemi, preeminent author and expert in manic-depressive illness. At the same time, I benefited from an emphasis on psychotherapeutic training, including supportive, psychodynamic, and behavioral modalities. I continue to deepen that training as a candidate in the Psychoanalytic Education Program at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, and my practice is now fully integrated, as I provide psychotherapy or psychoanalysis with or without medication.
Following residency I completed a fellowship in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at Northwestern, where I gained experience helping individuals adjust to living with serious medical illness and had the privilege of working with patients and families as they faced the existential questions that arose in that setting. I continue to be involved in education and research at the intersection of psychodynamics and serious illness as an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Medicine at Northwestern. While my psychiatry practice is more general, and I do not exclusively work with individuals coping with serious medical illness, these experiences and the understanding I’ve gained about loss and meaning in general informs all of my work.
Further, as a member of the midwest chapter of the Neuropsychoanalysis study group, I understand the myriad ways that psychology arises from and affects biology. The mind and body are not separate. Therefore I provide combined biological and psychological therapies, to promote the best outcomes, as we navigate living with the biology with which we were born in the social context in which we live, work, and love.
