A little bit about me.

Why would I leave clinical practice to do THIS???

Before posting my first proper article, I figured you should know a little about me as the author and why I decided to take this on. I have been a psychiatrist for 30+ years. I have had a slow and evolving retirement from direct clinical practice that started around 2020 – I will leave the details for a future article. While I have spent my career as a general psychiatrist, treating the full spectrum of common psychiatric issues, I have had a particular interest and experience in trauma and resilience. You may see my posts go a little heavy on these topics.

In my practice, I have always tried to maintain a down-to-earth and collaborative approach with my patients. I have a knack for seeing “how the machinery works” in individuals, and can tease apart the complex interactions among current circumstances, temperament, early childhood experiences and genetics to figure out how the person in front of me came to be who they are. With that knowledge I would typically work with them to agree on goals of treatment and a path to get there. There are often many correct paths to get to a desired goal. Some are clearly better than others in some cases and in some people. Being able to see the nuance matters greatly in a clinical setting but it is often difficult to convey that same information in a more general sense. I get frustrated when I read articles on mental health topics that oversimplify things (i.e. depression is just a “chemical imbalance”), or hold strongly to one particular approach to the exclusion of others. Viewing information in a single dimension can give a false sense of authority that one approach is clearly better across the board and it feeds into our tribal instincts. Even though professionals should “follow the science” in the sense of letting curiosity and structured inquiry guide them, I have lived long enough to see medical fads and trends that go like pendulum swings. The opiate crisis is a good example of that. I remember in the early 2000s when pain was the “5th vital sign” and look how that turned out. This is my long-winded way of saying that my priority here is to present topics in a balanced way and to try to include as much detail and nuance as possible so that your understanding may be more complete. In many cases, once you see your particular patterns in the complexity, you essentially have a key that (with the help of a therapist or physician) can unlock your particular problem. Also, as I have come to find out through my own experience, the medical system is great at doing a lot of things, but it has gaps. If you fall into one of the gaps, you can find yourself on a treadmill of trying different treatments and going for numerous tests without getting any improvement (more about this in future articles and probably a discussion about the comeback of terrain theory).

I often say “the ability to see a pattern is the ability to predict the future”. The benefit of my years of experience here is in seeing how certain things cluster together into predictable patterns. I will do my best to lay out these patterns and make them understandable. I want you to see them too. Instead of being limited to one person at a time, like in my clinical practice, I can now reach many of you at once. If you can learn to predict your own future, maybe you will be empowered to make choices that break old patterns and lead to a path of joy and fulfillment. The world can use a lot more of that right now. Please consider following me so we can learn and grow together.