I am a clinical psychologist with extensive training and experience helping adults, adolescents, and children of different cultures and beliefs with serious behavioral, mood, relationship, and health problems.
Education. I earned a B.A. in psychology from California State University, Northridge in 1985. I continued at CSUN for an M.A. in Community-Clinical Psychology in 1989, where I researched the social class and racial aspects of stereotyping. I earned a Ph.D. in Psychology in 1995 from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a traditional academic program with a strong psychoanalytic and existential focus accredited by the American Psychological Association since 1952. My training at UT focused on individual and group treatment and assessment of serious conduct, mood, and personality disturbances in adolescents, adults, and college athletes, concluding with dissertation research on the measurable impact of childhood family experiences on women’s interest and ability to successfully relate with others as adults.
Training. As part of the requirements for graduation from UT, I interned at Howard University Hospital in Washington, DC from 1993 to 1994, with emphasis on assessment, individual, and group treatment of economically distressed, culturally diverse urban adults and adolescents. The majority of my time at Howard was spent working with the seriously mentally ill and with liver and kidney transplant patients and their families. I then completed a postdoctoral residency in Group Psychotherapy and Psychology with the DC Mental Health Commission, working with adults in outpatient community mental health, inpatient substance abuse treatment, and court-mandated locked ward inpatient psychiatric care due to criminal insanity. I returned to California in 1995 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Adolescent Inpatient Psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
Professional Experience. After earning my license 1997, I was staff psychologist and assistant director of children and youth services for Kedren Community Mental Health Center and Acute Care Hospital, a longstanding private non-profit inner city agency in South Los Angeles until 2001. From 2001 until 2009 I was Director of Behavioral Medicine at Long Beach Memorial Family Medicine Residency Program, where I assisted in training primary care physicians in the specialty practice of being the “doctor’s doctor”, that is, treating and coordinating medical care for people of all ages and from birth to death. Concurrently, I held assistant clinical professorships in family medicine and psychiatry at UC Irvine, UCLA, and USC, and taught in the 1st-year medical school programs at UCLA and USC.
Continuing Education. In addition to the ongoing requirements for continuing education to renew my license, I've completed two year-long training courses in adult psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the Psychoanalytic Center of California. I've also completed training in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy. However, I do not practice or recommend EMDR for my patients because the overall body of research does not reliably support it.
