Professional Experience

Work Experience

I have worked in the mental health field since 1999. I served as an inpatient psychologist in a psychiatric hospital, first, on a female admission unit, then on a male unit, and finally, on a female trauma unit. During those times, I realized that sometimes the very same thing, hospital admissions and treatment, that was designed to alleviate emotional pain became traumatogenic.  I learned how important the therapeutic environment, setting, context, and relationship is for the healing process, as it has the potential to foster or deter personal growth despite best evidenced interventions, best intentions, and greatest reputations. Next, I undertook the challenge of managing and supervising a mobile psychiatric team that aimed at providing psychiatric services at homes, managing crises in the community, and preventing hospital admissions. Despite my administrative duties I continued providing clinical services to our clients, visiting them in the community, and facilitating their recovery. During the last few years, until the present time, I have been providing group and individual psychotherapy to individuals in an outpatient clinic setting. Finally, I have been involved in the training of psychology interns, psychiatric residents, and medical students by providing seminars and ongoing supervision.

Professional Interest

One of my professional interests is to promote trauma informed therapeutic environments that can stimulate the self-healing forces that each one of us have inside. I am trained psychodynamically but I tend to find several interventions from various theoretical frameworks very useful (i.e. CBT, cognitive remediation, exposure trauma therapy, motivational interviewing etc).