Meet Raghu Appasani, a renowned psychiatrist and stellar human who is changing the game in mental health treatment. Bid farewell to cold clinics and endless meds, this practice is about getting real with mental health, meeting people right where they're at, and using everything from deep chats to healthy fridge hauls to help change lives. We're talking about breaking down walls and showing how genuine human connection can go a long way. From villages in India to homes in the U.S., Raghu's exemplary approach shows us the power of real talk, real care, and real healing.
Transcript:
Psychiatry, but Make It Human
"for me, the field of psychiatry needs to really transform and needs to transform from just medicating and mitigating symptoms to truly understanding how can we help this person feel whole? How can we help this person achieve their goals? And that also entails getting outside of the four walls of a clinic, quite literally, right?
What it entails is actually meeting someone where they're at. Sometimes people are so depressed they can't get out of bed and the current system, what that means is that person is stuck until they can get themselves to a clinic. They're stuck. Yes, there has been some benefits to telehealth, but even that takes motivation. It takes a lot of steps to get on, to sign up, to open up the browser, to log in and converse with somebody.
And so for me, I wanted to create a practice in which I can really meet people where they're at. And I've done quite a bit of work in India around the mental health space and the work I've done there is quite literally going door to door in remote villages and educating people about mental health and assessing individuals and providing them care and treatment in their home.
So that's a model that I wanted to bring into the United States and my own practice here. And so I do go to people's homes. I spend time with them. We look at everything from how they're interacting with others in the home, how organized their rooms are to also the types of foods that they're eating and what they have in the fridge.
And coming up with the new grocery list, for example, and using food as a way to improve their overall mood and well-being as well. So when I was in medical school, I was rotating on psychiatry, and I realized that a lot of it was primarily based on pharmacology or medications,
But for me, what really stood out and what attracted me to the field as a career was actually spending time sitting with people and learning their stories, despite them being labeled with things like schizophrenia or bipolar and being in a locked psychiatric unit.
If you can just sit with them. At the end of the day, every human being just wants to feel secure and have positive attachment with somebody. And with that you can really get to know their story. And through that, the healing really happens. Yes, there's a benefit for medications, but what people really need is a safe space to share their story and to be heard. And that's why I chose psychiatry."
-Raghu Appasani