My path to psychiatric practice has been shaped by experiences in education, acute healthcare, and working with people and families from many different backgrounds.

Before becoming a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, I worked in education with refugee and immigrant adults. Supporting people as they navigated new languages, cultures, educational systems, and communities taught me to listen carefully, communicate clearly, and recognize how culture, language, trauma, and life circumstances can influence how someone understands and experiences their mental health.

That experience also gave me a particular skill that I bring to psychiatric care: working effectively with professional interpretation services. Communicating through an interpreter requires more than simply speaking through another person. It requires careful attention to language, pacing, meaning, cultural context, and nonverbal communication. In psychiatric care, where subtle differences in how someone describes thoughts, emotions, experiences, and symptoms can be clinically significant, this is an important part of my practice.

My nursing experience has given me a different but complementary perspective. I have worked in high-acuity inpatient psychiatric settings, caring for people experiencing significant mood symptoms, psychosis, behavioral changes, and psychiatric crises. This experience strengthened my ability to recognize changes in mental status, perform detailed psychiatric assessments, consider differential diagnoses, and make thoughtful decisions when symptoms are complex or rapidly changing.

I have also worked in neurological intensive care, caring for critically ill patients with conditions affecting the brain and nervous system. That experience deepened my understanding of the connection between neurological and psychiatric symptoms and strengthened my skills in assessing cognition, behavior, consciousness, and subtle changes in mental status. It continues to inform the way I think about psychiatric symptoms within the broader context of a person's physical health.

Together, these experiences shape how I practice today. I bring the assessment skills and clinical perspective developed in high-acuity settings, the communication skills developed through education and working across languages and cultures, and a deep respect for the expertise patients and families bring to their own care.

I provide psychiatric care for adolescents and adults, with particular interests in perinatal mental health, queer and gender-diverse people, and individuals navigating diverse cultural, religious, linguistic, family, and relationship experiences.

My approach is trauma-informed, curious, and collaborative. I believe good psychiatric care requires both careful clinical assessment and genuine understanding of the person experiencing the symptoms.

My goal is to create a space where you can be understood, ask questions, and participate meaningfully in decisions about your care.

— Lissa Fogel