The human mind has always fascinated me. Learning everything I can about the human mind was an innate passion and I would tell my parents "I want to be a psychiatrist when I grow up," since my early teen years. I was born in South Korea, immigrated to the US as a young child and grew up in Southern California. I attended UCLA where I obtained a Bachelor of Sciences degree in Psychobiology. The 360 + sunny days I was used to kept me close for medical school in Pomona, where I attended Western University for medical school. I completed an internship in internal medicine which gave me an incredibly valuable foundation for general medicine - benefits I am still realizing as I grow as a psychiatrist today. I was blessed to continue my training in my adult psychiatry residency at Harbor UCLA, the neighborhood county hospital I once dreamt of working at as a teen. The four year residency was followed by one year in the state of Connecticut where I dared to brave one winter in the northeast at Yale for my fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry. Although I do not miss the grey skies of New Haven , it was the most inspirational and challenging year of my educational life. I believe this is when the years of studying, reading, training, learning, began to truly solidify into a concrete foundation. I feel incredibly fortunate to have learned under the faculty in that program, some who are pioneers in the field of Addictions. My gratitude for their genuine passion for teaching, caring, research, learning, and opportunities will never fade.
The initial psychiatric evaluation will mainly consist of me asking you a lot of questions, some very detailed. Ultimately, by the end of the appointment, I want to have enough information about your history and current symptoms to make an assessment about if our relationship would be a viable doctor/patient relationship at this level of care based on all of the above variables AND if it is, I want to have at least some idea about a hypothesis and working diagnosis so I know where to start on our second appointment. In order to maximize our time together during our appointment, you will be asked to complete an intake questionnaire prior to the first appointment which will contain many of the questions that will be asked. I value your time and if it is obvious from that questionnaire that this setting is not the standard of care for the situation you are experiencing currently, you will be contacted before the appointment and given a referral.
I do believe this question pertains more to a therapist where each individual a unique approach. I am open minded yet as a physician, evidence based treatment and standard of care is exactly that - the standard.
I believe that the patients whom I can serve best will be referred directly to me.
Mind-body approach
As a psychiatrist, my entire education and training have been based on the mind-body approach. In fact the article published in Nature last year confirmed this theory and was able to identify a physical location where the dichotomy fuses in the brain. My primary concern as a provider who treats patients with medications is safety in the physical sense and making sure that there are not any non psychiatric reasons for the patient's presenting symptoms. This is especially important in the substance use disorder population.
Psychodynamic
Once I can safely treat a patient with the correct medications physically, I can add to the treatment by engaging in therapy, albeit not full therapy sessions, during appointments. I have found it to be so important to take a person and conceptualize the case from birth, attachments, childhood, developmental hx, until now, to take the whole person and incorporate CBT, MI in that context.