Adult Psychiatry
A wellness focused solution, personalized to your goals and your starting point. Care will begin with extensive intake paperwork. The goal is to understand each client as an individual. This includes understanding every aspect of your health and wellness as possible from psychiatric history, medical history, symptoms, medication history, personal timeline and traumas. There will be a deep dive into the key elements of wellness: nutrition, sleep, movement, stress management and social connection. The focus is on an individualized approach for each client’s goals and readiness to make change. Small, incremental changes lead to more sustainable success in meeting long term goals.
We incorporate a specialized approach in optimizing nutritional status by utilizing routine and specialized functional medicine laboratory work up. We can complete a dietary analysis to consider how food might be impacting your mood and cognition. We will not only consider diet and nutrition, but also how well your body is able to absorb nutrients and how your microbiome might be impacting your health.
This approach includes prescription medication when needed, but will also focus on recommendations for lifestyle interventions. Medication is a powerful tool, it saves lives and is necessary at times. That being said, we don’t want medication to be used as a band aid to mask problems either. What if your symptoms were a result of an underlying medical condition, a medication side effect, a vitamin deficiency, impact of a bad diet, sleep disturbance, toxic stress, substance use, childhood trauma, broken relationships or a combination of these factors? We do prescribe medications, but carefully. We also prescribe lifestyle interventions, dietary changes and supplements. The focus is on improving health and quality of life. Symptoms are thought of as signs that our body is telling us something needs attention.
The field of Psychiatry does not have a consensus on how or when to discontinue medications. Medication discontinuation syndrome is real and dangerous. Some people can easily stop psychotropic medications, but others can not. Through additional training, we have a protocol for discontinuing medications. The root cause of symptoms is addressed first. Then, nutritional support is put in place to safely taper medications. Medication tapers done correctly can take an extended period of time and again, above all, should be individualized to the client.
