I look at your mental health in context. Without examining context, one fails to see the whole person. As a social worker, I am trained to look at human beings in their social contexts, not in vacuums. As a student of anthropology I learned about the importance of context. If you are a person of color, your life is inevitably influenced, in one way or another, by the colonial / post-colonial context. If you are a LGBTQ person, you are affected by our culture’s attitudes toward different sexual and gender identities. If you are focusing on being a parent and maintaining a home at the expense of success in a career, perhaps you are not “failing” according to your own values; perhaps you are prioritizing. Maybe what many see as “disordered” behavior in you is a reasonable response to those stressors. Together, we can explore this.
In addition, looking at ones existence means looking at the current world we live in. I spend much of my free time reading, thinking and writing about what it means to live in the United States - and in New York in particular - in 2022. What does it mean to live in the current sociopolitical, economic and technological world? How does it differ from the worlds in which your parents and grandparents came of age? Most importantly, we will talk about what it is that YOU want out of life. Too often, therapists and others make assumptions about what should make a person happy, and never bother asking. With me, this will be a question to explore from Day One.
Let’s explore these questions together!