Tag: healthcare system

I became a psychologist because I wanted to be a healer.

At twenty-five, I believed I could save lives through therapy alone—reach into the chaos of psychosis, pull people back with presence and insight and bring them home to themselves. Not with medication. Not with systems. Just one mind in conversation with another. I’d read the stories—Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Harold Searles, Otto Will. I believed in that kind of power.

Thirty years later, in 1998, I emerged from a Christmas party on Lafayette Street, blinking in the cold, the voices of managed-care executives echoing in my ears.