Psychiatrist vs. Therapist for Physicians: What Women Doctors Actually Need
When a woman physician is struggling with burnout, moral injury, depression, or an identity crisis, the decision between a psychiatrist and a therapist isn’t just logistical. It’s clinical. This post walks through the real differences between these providers, what each can and can’t reach, why the most effective path often involves both, and what it means to weigh these choices inside a system that’s often not designed with your healing in mind.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Moment Between
- Psychiatrist vs. Therapist: Understanding the Clinical Difference
- The Neurobiology of Physician Distress
- When a Psychiatrist Is the Right First Call
- When Therapy Provides the Deeper Healing
- Both/And: Why the Most Effective Path Uses Both
- The Systemic Lens: Why the System Incentivizes Prescribing Over Treating
- A Path Forward for Women Physicians
- Frequently Asked Questions
Psychiatrists and therapists serve different functions: a psychiatrist is a medical doctor who prescribes and manages medication, while a therapist provides ongoing relational, behavioral, and trauma-informed psychotherapy without prescribing. For physician mental health, the distinction matters because burnout, moral injury, and relational trauma are primarily psychological problems that medication alone doesn’t resolve. Many women physicians begin with a psychiatrist because it feels more medically legitimate, but find the deeper work requires a therapist familiar with their professional culture. In my work with driven women physicians, the most effective support is almost always a collaborative model that includes both.
In short: A psychiatrist prescribes and manages medication while a therapist provides psychotherapy, and for physician burnout and relational trauma, the most effective support usually involves both working together.
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I’ve worked with women physicians working through mental health care decisions across more than 15,000 clinical hours, and the confusion between these roles is nearly universal in this population. When I sit with a physician client and try to make sense of how her occupational stress has fused with older relational wounds, I keep coming back to Judith Herman, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery (Herman 1992). Her framework for how trauma organizes a person’s sense of safety is the lens I use most often in this work.
The Moment Between
| Dimension | Psychiatrist | Therapist |
|---|---|---|
| Scope of practice | Medical management: prescribing and monitoring medication, and assessing psychiatric conditions within a medical framework. | Psychotherapy: the relational work of processing, gaining insight, shifting patterns, and paying sustained attention to how someone is actually doing over time. |
| What women physicians often actually need | Many women physicians present with depression or anxiety that has a real biological component. Sleep disruption, chronic stress load, and sometimes perimenopause mean medication is often genuinely called for. | The harder-to-name stuff: physician identity, the grief of what this work demands, relational strain, and the particular shame of needing help when you’re supposed to be the one who helps. That’s therapy’s territory. |
| The shame question | Physicians often have complicated feelings about psychiatric medications, tangled up with stigma and professional identity. A good psychiatrist names that directly instead of skating past it. | A good therapist for physicians has to understand the culture: the training, the identity, the particular way suffering gets managed and minimized in medicine. Otherwise she risks repeating the same invalidation the physician already lives with. |
| Confidentiality and reporting | This is a real fear for physicians. Psychiatric treatment doesn’t typically trigger licensing board reporting, but the anxiety around it is common enough that it deserves a direct, accurate answer rather than reassurance alone. | Therapy confidentiality is strong. Knowing the specific exceptions, like duty to warn or child abuse reporting, and how those differ from professional reporting requirements, matters for physicians deciding whether to get help. |
| The case for both | Medication without therapy leaves the psychological piece untouched. The chemistry matters, but what actually drives physician burnout and depression rarely resolves through prescription alone. | Therapy without a psychiatric evaluation, when biology is genuinely part of the picture, leaves someone working too hard against her own nervous system. A coordinated model serves physicians best. |
| Finding the right fit | Look for a psychiatrist who understands medical culture, speaks the physician’s language, and doesn’t need her to perform wellness or downplay what the work actually demands. | Look for a therapist who isn’t intimidated by the physician’s expertise, who understands the particular relational dynamics of medical culture, and who can hold both the competent professional and the person underneath who is suffering. |
Akiko, 44, a gastroenterologist, sits in her car in the hospital parking structure at 6:48 a.m. The pre-dawn chill has seeped into the leather seats, mirroring the cold dread settled deep in her chest. She’s already cried once this morning, a silent, desperate release that left her eyes burning but did nothing to touch the ache underneath it.
In her coat pocket, a prescription pad lies heavy. She’s aware, at the edge of consciousness, of a dark thought about the medications she could so easily prescribe. She’s not sure if it’s a serious thought or a desperate one, and she doesn’t call anyone to find out. She just goes in.
What Akiko doesn’t know is that she’s facing a question that will shape the next several years of her life: what kind of help does she actually need? And does the system around her have any real interest in helping her answer that question honestly?
In my work with women physicians in therapy, this exact moment, the car, the parking structure, the morning before the shift, the thought that doesn’t quite form into words, is one of the most common entry points I see. It’s rarely a crisis, exactly. It’s quieter than that: a woman who has been trained to push through everything, finally reaching the edge of what pushing can do.
A note on safety: If you’re having any thoughts of self-harm or suicide, please don’t face this alone. Call or text 988, or reach the Physicians Support Line at 1-888-409-0141 for free, confidential peer support from physicians, available 24/7.
Psychiatrist vs. Therapist: Understanding the Clinical Difference
For physicians, the distinction between a psychiatrist and a therapist is often assumed to be obvious. What I actually find, sitting across from women doctors, is genuine uncertainty about what each provider does and what each one can and can’t reach.
A psychiatrist is a medical doctor (MD or DO) who has completed medical school and a specialized residency in psychiatry, which gives her a comprehensive understanding of human physiology, neurochemistry, and the interface between physical and mental health. She can prescribe and manage psychotropic medications, and that’s the core of what most psychiatric appointments involve. While some psychiatrists integrate psychotherapy into their practice, the prevailing model, particularly in managed care, is medication management: brief appointments, typically 15 to 30 minutes, focused on assessing medication efficacy, monitoring side effects, and adjusting dosages.
A therapist is a licensed mental health professional, an LMFT, LCSW, psychologist, or LPC, trained in psychological assessment and psychotherapeutic modalities. Her expertise is in facilitating emotional processing, exploring relational dynamics, addressing past trauma, and helping people restructure the cognitive and behavioral patterns that produce suffering. She cannot prescribe medication. Her focus sits in the psychological interior: developmental history, relational wounds, identity, meaning.
Moral injury is distinct from burnout. I first started using the term with physician clients after reading Simon Talbot, MD, surgeon and researcher, and Wendy Dean, MD, psychiatrist and writer, who coined it for the physician context in a landmark 2018 article in STAT News. It names the psychological distress that comes from participating in, failing to prevent, or witnessing events that transgress your own deeply held moral code. For physicians, this most commonly shows up when the practice of medicine, as dictated by systemic pressures, administrative burdens, or resource limitations, stops aligning with the ethical principles and compassionate care that drew them to the profession in the first place.
In plain terms: Moral injury is what happens when medicine as you practice it stops matching why you went to medical school. It’s not burnout. It’s a wound to your integrity. And medication management alone can’t touch it.
For a woman physician grappling with burnout, moral injury, or identity crisis, neither provider alone is typically sufficient to address the full spectrum of her needs. A psychiatrist can manage acute neurobiological symptoms effectively and provide a crucial foundation of stability. A therapist can provide profound psychological healing. The optimal path for many physicians involves both. Coordinated, complementary, addressing different levels of the same person.
This is the clinical pattern where a physician’s sense of self becomes indistinguishable from her role and performance as a doctor. I think about this constantly in session, and the researcher whose work keeps giving me language for it is Tait Shanafelt, MD, professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and a leading voice on physician wellbeing and burnout. His research documents how this fusion drives much of the severity physicians experience during burnout or career crises, because when the role is threatened, the entire self feels threatened.
In plain terms: Your identity as a doctor is so deeply woven into who you are that any threat to that role feels like a threat to your very being. That’s not a prescription problem. That’s a therapeutic one.
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The Neurobiology of Physician Distress
Physician burnout is a recognized crisis in healthcare now, and Tait Shanafelt, MD’s research at Stanford has consistently found burnout rates exceeding 50% among physicians, substantially higher among women physicians specifically. But what usually gets left out of the conversation is the neurobiological complexity underneath what everyone just calls burnout.
Many women physicians are carrying layers that go beyond the occupational stress model: complex relational trauma, often rooted in developmental history; a profound fusion of identity with the medical role; moral injury accumulated over years of systemic constraints on good care. Together, these create a kind of distress that a typical medication management appointment was never built to address.
Psychiatric medication can be highly effective for the neurological symptom load: depression, anxiety, sleep disruption. But medication doesn’t process trauma. It doesn’t address moral injury. It doesn’t help a physician disentangle her identity from her role, or understand why the same relational patterns that organized her childhood are now organizing her relationship with hospital administration. That work needs a clinical relationship with a therapist who has time, training, and a genuine understanding of what the medical environment actually does to people.
Medicine’s training environment is intense, prolonged, and often dehumanizing, and combined with the sheer weight of patient responsibility, it creates conditions where a physician’s sense of self can become almost inseparable from her professional performance. When that performance is threatened or diminished, the psychological toll goes far past professional disappointment. It activates something much older, much more foundational.
When a Psychiatrist Is the Right First Call
There are specific clinical junctures where psychiatric intervention isn’t just helpful. It’s essential.
Consider Aparna, 49, an academic oncologist. In eight weeks, she’s lost 14 pounds, is sleeping four hours a night, and has withdrawn from her husband. Her depression has crossed a threshold where psychotherapy alone, no matter how skilled the therapist, will struggle to gain traction. She needs psychiatric evaluation and likely medication to stabilize her neurobiology before deeper therapeutic work can even begin.
Psychiatry is the right first call when:
- Depression, anxiety, or PTSD symptoms are severe enough to significantly impair daily functioning, making it difficult to work, maintain relationships, or care for yourself
- There’s suspected psychiatric comorbidity, such as bipolar disorder, OCD, or ADHD, that requires specialized pharmacological management
- Medication can provide the neurological stability that creates the floor on which therapy can build
- Suicidal ideation or thoughts of self-harm are present. This is not a “wait and see” situation; it requires immediate evaluation
This isn’t an anti-medication position. It’s a pro-sequence position: the right intervention at the right time, in the right order, for the right reasons.
When Therapy Provides the Deeper Healing
“You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise.”
Maya Angelou, poet and memoirist, “Still I Rise”
While psychiatric intervention can be life-saving for acute symptom management, it often doesn’t touch the deeper psychological layers that feed a physician’s distress. This is where trauma-informed therapy becomes indispensable, particularly therapy that genuinely understands the culture of medicine and what it does to the people who practice it.
For women physicians, the roots of current struggles often extend far beyond the immediate pressures of their careers. They frequently have developmental origins: early relational patterns, parentification, an overachievement strategy that worked until it didn’t, all of which the medical environment then amplifies and activates. Therapy for physicians therefore involves several distinct threads.
Processing moral injury. Not just intellectually acknowledging it, but emotionally processing the grief, anger, and sense of betrayal that comes from watching medicine fail to be what it promised to be. This requires a space where the physician can speak the unspeakable, the patient she couldn’t save because of a system constraint, the care she couldn’t give because of a protocol requirement, and have those experiences witnessed and integrated rather than pushed through.
Reclaiming identity beyond the white coat. Therapy helps disentangle the physician’s identity from her professional role, not to diminish the role, but to create enough distance that a threat to it no longer feels like a threat to her entire existence. This is slow, careful work, and it’s some of the most meaningful work I do with physician clients.
Healing relational trauma. Many physicians, because of early relational experiences, were drawn to medicine partly as a way to find belonging, validation, or a sense of control through competence. Therapy addresses the underlying patterns, the parentification, the early attachment wounds, the relational strategies that organized childhood, that now organize the physician’s relationship with authority, failure, and care.
Building the capacity to receive care. Physicians are trained, comprehensively, to give care. The capacity to receive it, to be the one who needs something, to tolerate vulnerability, to let someone else’s attention actually land on them, is often underdeveloped to the point of near absence. This is one of the most fundamental reversals therapy offers.
One significant access barrier for physicians seeking therapy is that standard 50-minute weekly appointments simply don’t fit unpredictable schedules. Telehealth and therapists with multi-state licensure address this, providing both flexibility and an added layer of confidentiality for physicians who have legitimate concerns about being recognized.
Both/And: Why the Most Effective Path Uses Both
The reality for many women physicians is that the most effective path to healing involves both psychiatry and therapy. Not as redundant or interchangeable interventions, but as complementary ones addressing different levels of the same person.
Anita, 46, a trauma surgeon, is currently taking sertraline that has given her crucial stabilization, enough to remain functional in a demanding role. But she’s been emotionally numb for two years. The medication gave her a necessary floor. It kept her from a complete collapse into severe depression. But the deeper work, processing the moral injuries, untangling the identity fusion, healing the relational wounds, hasn’t begun. She hasn’t made the second call, to a therapist, because the medication made her “good enough,” and the medical culture subtly discourages seeking more, leaving her unsure whether she deserves it.
This is the central Both/And: psychiatric support manages the neurological symptom load, while therapy does the developmental, relational, and identity work that medication alone can never reach. They’re not in competition. They operate on entirely different levels, and the physician who has access to both, coordinated rather than contradictory, has the most complete path to genuine healing.
In my practice, I work with women physicians in depth therapy addressing the trauma, moral injury, and identity fusion that show up so consistently in this population. This work is often complemented by psychiatric care when indicated. My multi-state licensure is a specific advantage for physicians who travel, rotate through different healthcare systems, or worry about local confidentiality, since it means access to comprehensive, private care isn’t constrained by geography.
If you’re a woman physician who’s been managing on “good enough” and wondering whether something deeper is possible, I’d welcome a conversation.
The Systemic Lens: Why the System Incentivizes Prescribing Over Treating
The challenges physicians face in accessing comprehensive mental healthcare are not individual failings. They’re embedded in systemic structures that have specific economic logic.
A 15-minute medication management appointment is highly billable and efficient within prevailing insurance frameworks. It allows a high volume of patient encounters and supports productivity metrics. A 50-minute depth therapy session, the kind that processes moral injury, untangles identity fusion, and creates lasting change, is often reimbursed at substantially lower rates, if at all. This creates a structural bias toward pharmacological solutions, even when psychotherapeutic intervention is more clinically appropriate.
Hospitals and healthcare systems operating under financial pressure have a direct incentive to keep physicians functioning and productive, not necessarily healed. The investment required for deep, time-intensive work often gets categorized as cost rather than infrastructure. The result is a cycle: distress is medicated enough to permit continued functioning, the underlying causes remain, and the distress eventually resurfaces.
Physician Health Programs, while ostensibly designed to support physician mental health, often operate with inherent conflicts of interest. Their primary relationship is with hospitals, employers, or licensing boards, not with the physician as patient. Their model is frequently compliance-oriented rather than therapeutically oriented, which creates an environment where vulnerability and genuine help-seeking can feel professionally dangerous rather than safe.
Pamela Wible, MD, advocate for physician well-being and author of Physician Suicide Letters. Answered, has spent years documenting how the current system is often inadvertently designed to produce quiet compliance rather than genuine flourishing. I think of her work often when a physician client describes a Physician Health Program interaction that felt more like surveillance than support. Her research points to the need for structural reform, not just individual coping strategies, and for healthcare environments where seeking help is supported rather than penalized.
Understanding this systemic context matters for driven women physicians sorting through their own care decisions. You’re not making a private, purely individual choice when you decide whether to see a psychiatrist or a therapist or both. You’re working inside a system with financial incentives of its own. Being clear-eyed about those incentives is part of advocating effectively for yourself.
A Path Forward for Women Physicians
For women physicians working through these questions, here’s my clinical guidance:
Prioritize psychiatric evaluation for acute neurological symptoms. Severe sleep disruption, significant appetite changes, profound fatigue, intense sadness, or impaired concentration that affects your ability to function all warrant psychiatric evaluation. Medication can provide crucial stabilization and create the platform on which deeper work can build. This is not weakness. It’s pragmatic sequencing.
Seek a trauma-informed therapist who actually understands medicine. Ask directly: have you worked with physicians? Do you understand moral injury? What is your experience with the culture of medical training? A therapist who has never spent time in a hospital environment, never understood the specific ethical weight of patient responsibility, and never had a client working through licensure confidentiality concerns will struggle to provide what you need. Telehealth and multi-state licensure matter here too.
Treat psychiatric support and therapy as complementary, not alternatives. One provides the floor, the other builds the structure above it, and you deserve both, coordinated rather than contradictory.
Understand Physician Health Programs before engaging with them. If you find yourself involved with a PHP, approach it with clarity about who it primarily serves. Seek independent therapy outside the PHP structure to ensure complete confidentiality and an unbiased therapeutic relationship where the primary allegiance is to your healing, not to institutional compliance.
Challenge the internalized stigma. The medical culture trains physicians to minimize their own distress, be stoic, and project invincibility. Those messages are deeply embedded. They’re also wrong. Seeking the care you need is a sign of strength and responsible self-maintenance, and it benefits your patients too, not just you.
You went into medicine to help people. You deserve help too. That’s not a philosophical position. It’s a clinical necessity. The physicians who can’t receive care eventually can’t give it either.
The Identity Questions That Medication Alone Can’t Answer
I want to spend some time on a dimension of physician distress that gets very little attention in the clinical and popular literature: the question of what medicine does to identity, and why that question requires a therapist rather than a prescriber.
Physicians, particularly women physicians, undergo a training process that is, and I use this word deliberately, identity-replacing rather than identity-building. The person who enters medical school is systematically shaped, over a decade of grueling training, into someone who can perform the role of physician. The personal traits, preferences, vulnerabilities, and relational patterns that don’t serve the role get suppressed, not addressed. They go underground, often for decades, until the role itself becomes threatened, exhausted, or unsustainable, and the suppressed material begins to surface without permission.
This is what I see in women physicians who come to therapy after years of medication management: they’ve been held at a functional level, which is genuinely valuable. But the questions generating below the surface, who am I outside this role, what do I actually want, what did I sacrifice to get here and was it worth it, are still unanswered. Those questions, while not amenable to pharmacological treatment, are urgent. They’re organizing a person’s life. They deserve clinical attention.
Imani, 48, an emergency physician with twenty years of clinical practice, came to therapy after a second bout of major depression. She’d been on sertraline for three years after the first episode and had been maintained on it since. The medication was working, clinically. But she described a recurring experience she couldn’t quite name: sitting in her car before a shift and feeling, not dread exactly, but something closer to grief. A sense of something enormous she’d given up that she’d never had the space to mourn.
Over the course of our work together, what emerged was the story of the physician she’d become and the person she’d set aside to become her. There was the cellist she’d been before medical school, who played with genuine passion and had considered music seriously, but who had made the “practical” choice instead. There was the person who had wanted to do global health work but had been steered toward emergency medicine for its stability and earning potential. And there was the woman who had married quickly because it seemed like the time to do it, before the training got harder, and who had organized her relational life around her husband’s needs partly because her professional life consumed everything else.
None of these losses were catastrophic in isolation. Together, they constituted a life that had been substantially organized around what the role required rather than what she actually wanted. The grief that sat in the car with her before each shift wasn’t about the job itself. It was about the accumulated cost of two decades of a life half-lived.
This is not amenable to medication. It’s not a symptom of depression to be treated. It’s an experience of real loss that requires acknowledgment, mourning, and eventually some kind of reorientation toward what’s still possible. That work is therapeutic, and it’s some of the most meaningful work I do with physician clients.
For women physicians in the midst of this kind of reckoning, asking the identity questions that medical training never made room for, I want to offer this: it’s not too late. The identity that got suppressed by the role isn’t gone. It’s present, often with considerable force, in exactly the grief and dread and flatness that’s been driving you to seek help. That material isn’t pathology. It’s information. Therapy can help you hear it clearly enough to know what to do with it.
The physician who can receive care, who can let her own grief matter, who can ask what she actually wants and let the answer change something, is a better physician. Not just a more sustainable one, though that matters too, but a more genuinely present one. The capacity to be with suffering without being destroyed by it, which is the core of what physicians do for patients, is built on the physician’s own relationship with her own suffering. That relationship gets built in therapy, not in prescription management.
If you’re a woman physician reading this, wherever you are in the arc of your career, wherever you are in the arc of your distress, I want you to know that what you’re carrying deserves more than a 15-minute medication management appointment. Reaching out for something more comprehensive is not weakness. It’s one of the most clinically sound decisions you can make.
Q: Will seeing a psychiatrist affect my medical license?
A: Generally, no. Seeking treatment for common conditions like depression or anxiety does not automatically affect your medical license. The specifics vary by state and licensing board. Private, self-pay therapy and psychiatry offer an added layer of confidentiality because they don’t involve insurance claims. If you have specific concerns, consulting with an attorney who specializes in physician licensure is worth the investment.
Q: Do I need medication or therapy first?
A: It depends on severity. If you’re experiencing significant impairment to daily functioning. Severe sleep disruption, inability to concentrate, thoughts of self-harm. Psychiatric evaluation for medication is typically the right first step. Once you have a stable neurobiological floor, therapy can address the underlying psychological issues. For less severe presentations, therapy may be the right starting point. For many physicians, a coordinated combination is most effective.
Q: Should I tell my chief of staff that I’m in therapy?
A: This is a personal decision with professional dimensions. You’re not generally required to disclose mental health treatment to your chief of staff unless it directly affects your ability to perform your duties safely. Given the stigma that persists in medical culture, many physicians choose to keep this private. If you’re unsure, consult with an attorney who specializes in physician licensure before making any disclosures.
Q: Can my EAP therapist actually help with physician burnout?
A: EAPs can provide initial support and short-term counseling. But EAP therapists typically have limited sessions available and may lack specialized experience with the specific complexity of physician burnout, moral injury, and medical culture. For deeper, sustained work on physician-specific issues, a therapist with specialized training and genuine experience in this area is significantly more effective.
Q: How do I find a therapist who actually understands medicine?
A: Ask directly in a consultation. Have you worked with physicians? Do you understand moral injury? What is your experience with the culture of medical training? Listen for whether their answer demonstrates genuine familiarity. Not just familiarity with “high-stress careers” generically, but with the specific ethical weight, the training culture, and the licensure confidentiality concerns that are particular to medicine.
Q: Is burnout the same as depression? Do I need antidepressants?
A: They’re distinct conditions that frequently co-occur. Burnout is primarily an occupational phenomenon tied to chronic workplace stress; depression is a pervasive clinical syndrome affecting all domains of life. Burnout can trigger depression, and they often reinforce each other. Antidepressants can be appropriate for the depressive component. But for the burnout itself, structural changes and therapeutic work are more effective than medication alone.
Q: What if I can’t find therapy time with my schedule?
A: Telehealth has made this significantly more manageable. Look for therapists who offer early morning, evening, or weekend appointments, and who use telehealth. Allowing you to access sessions from anywhere with privacy. Therapists who specialize in physician clients often understand the scheduling reality and build flexibility into their practices. Multi-state licensure is also valuable if you rotate through different locations.
Q: What is moral injury and how is it different from burnout?
A: Burnout is depletion. The exhaustion of resources by chronic demands. Moral injury is a wound to integrity. The distress produced when what you’re required to do violates what you believe is right. Simon Talbot, MD and Wendy Dean, MD articulated this distinction in their 2018 Lancet paper: physicians aren’t just burned out, they’re experiencing the specific wound of being unable to practice medicine in alignment with their values. The treatments differ meaningfully.
Related Reading
Talbot, Simon G., and Wendy Dean. “Physicians Aren’t ‘Burning Out.’ They’re Suffering from Moral Injury.” STAT News, July 26, 2018.
Shanafelt, Tait D., et al. “Changes in Burnout and Satisfaction with Work-Life Integration in Physicians and the General US Working Population Between 2011 and 2020.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 97, no. 3 (2022): 491, 506.
Wible, Pamela. Physician Suicide Letters. Answered. Pamela Wible, MD, 2016.
Melnyk, Bernadette Mazurek, et al. “Interventions to Improve Mental Health, Well-Being, Physical Health, and Lifestyle Behaviors in Physicians and Nurses: A Systematic Review.” American Journal of Health Promotion 34, no. 8 (2020): 921, 933.
References
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Random House, 1969.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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