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Humanizing Psychiatry and Alternative Treatment Options
Psychiatry can get a bad reputation as psychiatrists we are relegated to the role of pill pushers. I know many of us do work that way, with a quick conversation and then out comes the prescription pads. On some level, that has been dictated by the insurance industry, which will only compensate a short medication management visit and not compensate at all if medications are not [...]
Brave New Medicine: Ketamine’s Promise and Pitfalls
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World describes a futuristic society pacified by a daily dose of soma—a drug that ensures collective compliance and emotional numbness at the expense of curiosity, dissent, and authentic feeling. As an addiction psychiatrist and clinician who offers Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP), I often find myself reflecting on the parallels between Huxley’s vision and the rapidly expanding, commercialized use of ketamine in modern psychiatry. [...]
On Time, Space, and Being Human
Space, Time, & Einstein Lately I’ve been reading Einstein’s biography, where he talks about space, time, mass, and energy in such creative ways. He describes how space and time cannot be defined without each other—how they are interwoven, inseparable. This led me to reflect on how we, too, exist within the fabric of time. Not just the hours on a clock or the phases of a [...]
Integrative Psychiatry: Remembering the Soul of Our Work
The word psychiatry carries a history that most of us rarely pause to consider. Its roots trace back to the Medieval Latin psychiatria, which itself is woven from two Greek words: psykhē, meaning mind or soul, and iatreia, meaning healing or care. Built into the very language is an ancient understanding that this field was always meant to tend to the soul. And yet, somewhere [...]
Summer Communitas
As the summer rolls along and I spend time gathering with others I have reflected on how good it feels. It conjures up thoughts from a book by anthropologist Victor Turner discussing the value of communitas. Here’s a definition: Communitas is a Latin noun that means "community" and can refer to a feeling of shared humanity, intimacy, and solidarity that develops among people who experience liminality [...]
Addiction and Spirituality
What is addiction? My philosophy is that addiction is a behavioral response to feel better, to avoid pain or discomfort. Our society has driven us to become less tolerant of discomfort so one part of an addiction treatment model would be distress tolerance education. There is often a deeper wound that Carl Jung and William James explored, they viewed addiction as spiritual thirst for wholeness– a [...]
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September 13, 2026
September 13, 2026