What made you decide to change your approach? When did you have the realization that for you that approach wasn't working? You know, I

was never really a conventional psychiatrist.

I mean, I was trained conventionally, but I'm also trained as a psychoanalyst.

And that already is rather unusual because my practice was never one of just prescribing medications.

Like my primary modality of therapy was talking, the talking cure.

So I had, um, a patient, a practice that was primarily psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and I would occasionally use medications.

But, um, in 2005, both my parents died within three months of one another.

How do all of those things play into the mental health issues that you're seeing?

Oh.

And, um, when my parents both died within a few months of each other in 2005, and also my marriage ended at the same time, and I had three young children, I was kind of putting one foot in front of another just, you know, trying to kind of survive amidst these confluence of losses.

And, um, that was the first time that I consulted a professional astrologer, which isn't so strange given my dad's interest in it, and it was something that I was always aware of.

Um, but up until that point, I had practiced fairly conventionally as a psychoanalyst psychiatrist, which already is not that typical because most psychiatrists are not psychoanalysts and are more, um, psychopharmacologists.

Um, but I consulted with that astrologer, and I was so blown away by my conversation with her, and I found it so meaningful and so moving and so insightful, that I went back to see her multiple times, um, to look at the charts of my children and charts of family members and to make sense of my life, and then eventually decided that I wanted to become an astrologer myself.

And then I subsequently apprenticed myself to two well-known astrologers, and that was kind of the beginning of the journey of opening up my practice to all kinds of different holistic modalities, um, including functional medicine, like functional psychiatry.

Um, you know, like really addressing, um, things like, um, environmentally acquired illness and, um, like mold toxicity and, uh, learning about the connection between the gut and the brain, which when I started, um, investigating that was way before it was, like, part of, uh, the common, um, in the media the way it is today.

Yeah.