I became a psychiatrist by way of the classroom. After graduating from Yale in 1996, I spent three years teaching middle school science and math — first in Manhattan, then in the Bronx — at schools for underserved kids. I went on to medical school at SUNY Downstate, paused midway to return to teaching for another year, and came back to my training certain of one thing: that I wanted to spend my life paying close attention to other people.

That conviction has held through twenty years and nearly every setting psychiatry has to offer. After my residency at Brown, I worked in VA outpatient clinics, on adolescent inpatient units, in community mental health, at a university counseling service, and in partial hospital programs; for three years I covered hospital units in California and Pennsylvania remotely while living in Europe. I’ve sat with people at the most acute moments of their lives and through the slow, ordinary work of getting better. That range is the foundation of how I practice now, with a focus on listening and recognizing what’s arising.

Alongside the clinical work, I committed myself to becoming a therapist. I completed a rigorous five-year program in psychoanalysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and I built a private practice centered on therapy. I believe therapy is the heart of this work — that lasting change comes through relationship, understanding, and the patient coming to know the patterns we carry. I prescribe medication when it helps. I think of it as an adjunct to the deeper work rather than a substitute for it. Attachment — how each of us learned to need, trust, and be close to others — is the lens I return to again and again.

My work is also shaped by a mindfulness-based approach and a personal meditation practice. I’ve come to believe that awareness and insight practices belong inside the therapy, not beside it.

I’ve loved the forest my whole life — when I was a young man I dreamed of walking the entire Appalachian Trail. I love the White Mountains: the wind on my skin, the smell of the trees, the way light moves across the surface of a stream. I also believe group is among the most powerful forms of therapy we have — a place where other people become mirrors, offering perspectives and possibilities a single relationship can’t. Wildpsych grew out of all of it: a conviction, tested over two decades, that we do some of our most honest work when we step out of the consulting room — into our bodies, into the wild, and into the company of others walking their own path.