I am a Harvard affiliated, board certified, conventionally trained adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and a Certified GAPS Practitioner located in Newton, Massachusetts. I have a deep curiosity about development and healing, and have an open mind about trying diverse approaches to help my patients. I am familiar and skilled in working within a traditional medical/psychiatric model, but am now much more drawn to nutritional approaches to healing, as well as more unconventional energetic/holistic/ spiritual approaches. I love my work, which I see as helping my patients become most fully themselves, enjoying optimum health and vitality, and creating and living a life they love.
Increasingly I have begun to work with many of my patients to help them make changes in their diets and lifestyle that allow them to stop taking prescription medications. I have a particularly passionate interest in the approach of Natasha Campbell-McBride’s nutritional protocol for healing, GAPS, the philosophy and political activism of The Weston A Price Foundation, the Evolutionary/Paleolithic perspective on health and nutrition, and the importance of a high saturated fat, moderate protein and low carbohydrate diet with an avoidance of all processed and refined foods for optimal health. I have a goal of helping my patients heal with natural means: foods, detoxification and natural supplements, and not simply treating symptoms with one pharmaceutical or invasive procedure after another.
My approach to my patients reflects my belief in the centrality of the healing potential of the therapeutic relationship, the power of the unconscious in our lives and our spiritual relationship to the cosmos.
I chose a bridge as the symbol for my practice. I am drawn to consideration and inclusion of disparate contrasting elements in my understanding of people and situations. I like to keep the past and the present, the traditional and innovative, the ordinary and the sacred, the body/mind and spirit all alive in my mind when I try to understand a person and figure out how to help. The bridge is also a symbol for attachment and connection, a necessary condition if psychological growth is to occur. Attachment provides the central context in which my patients and I work together to heal them, and clear the way for further progressive development.
