In-network with Stanford student insurance and Wellfleet.
For students, grad students, postdocs and scholars who want open-ended depth work — and do not realise their health plan already covers it.
Free 15-min consultation · 667 Lytton Ave, a short ride from campus
People generally find me when they want something that does not have a number attached to it. Work that can run for a year, or three, and that moves at whatever pace the material actually needs rather than a pace decided in advance.
Short, focused therapy is genuinely the right tool for a bounded problem — a bad quarter, a breakup, a decision that needs making. It is a different tool from the one you need for a pattern that has been running since you were fourteen. Most of what I see is the second kind, and it takes the time it takes.
Sessions are fifty minutes, usually weekly, and open-ended. No intake battery. No treatment plan handed to you in week two. No point at which we stop because a number was reached.
I am in-network with Stanford’s student health plan — SHIP, now Cardinal Care — and with Wellfleet, which administers a number of postdoc and visiting-scholar plans. Being in-network means you pay a copay rather than a private-pay rate, and I bill the plan directly. There is no reimbursement paperwork on your side.
This surprises people more than it should. There is a widespread assumption that student insurance only covers care on campus. Stanford’s own guidance says otherwise: the plan lets you choose care from an in-network provider off campus, and there are out-of-network benefits beyond that. The coverage is broader than most students realise.
If you are unsure what your specific plan pays, call the member services number on your card and ask about outpatient mental-health benefits and your copay for CPT code 90837. Two questions, one phone call.
Stanford has a specific psychological weather, and it is worth naming rather than pretending everyone arrives with generic anxiety.
Being unremarkable for the first time. A great many people here spent eighteen years as the most capable person in the room and then landed somewhere the median is extraordinary. That is a genuine identity injury, and it is almost impossible to say out loud without sounding like you are bragging — which is precisely why it goes unspoken and untreated.
The advisor relationship. For doctoral students, one person often holds your funding, your timeline, your reference letters and your sense of whether the work is any good. That concentration of power reproduces family dynamics with uncanny precision, and it is one of the most common things I work on.
Not knowing whether you want it. Several years into a programme, the question of whether you actually want this life — as opposed to being good at the thing that got you here — tends to surface. It is a hard question to raise with anyone whose approval you need.
Distance from home. International students carry a version of this that domestic students do not: a family that cannot picture your daily life, a time zone that makes calls a scheduling problem, and often a debt of expectation that no achievement quite settles.
I practise gestalt and depth-oriented therapy. In practical terms: less analysing your life from a distance, more attention to what happens in you while you talk about it. Where the breath stops. What you move away from. What your voice does on a particular name.
This matters here because Stanford selects for people who are exceptionally good at explaining themselves. You can probably already narrate your attachment style, your family system and your avoidance patterns with real precision, and none of it has changed anything. That gap — between understanding something and being altered by it — is the whole of my work.
No worksheets. No homework. No promise that a fixed number of sessions will resolve something that took twenty years to build.
The office is at 667 Lytton Avenue in downtown Palo Alto — a short bike ride or a few minutes on the Marguerite from most of campus, and walkable from the University Avenue Caltrain station if you are coming from the city or from further down the peninsula.
Video sessions are available anywhere in California, which in practice matters most over the summer, during fieldwork, or in the weeks when leaving your building is itself the problem.
Yes. I am in-network with Stanford’s student health insurance plan — the plan most people still call SHIP, now administered as Cardinal Care. Students, postdocs and covered dependents pay a copay rather than the full session fee, and I bill the plan directly.
There is no set answer, which is rather the point. Some people come for a few months around a particular thing. Others stay for a year or several. The work is open-ended and we review it together as we go rather than against a number decided in advance.
That is worth saying at the start, because it changes what is useful to do with the time. Short, focused work on a bounded problem is a real and effective thing — it is simply a different piece of work from the open-ended kind, and I would rather we both know which one we are doing.
Yes, as long as you are physically in California at session time. Sessions can be by video wherever you are in the state. If you leave California permanently we will talk about it in advance and I will help you find someone where you are going — abruptly disappearing is not a good ending to therapy.
No. Therapy notes are protected health information. They are not shared with your department, your advisor, your funding source or immigration authorities. The narrow legal exceptions — imminent danger to yourself or another person, or abuse of a child or dependent adult — apply to every licensed therapist in California and I will explain them fully in the first session.
Not from me. There is no record that reaches the university. Insurance billing produces a claim to the health plan, the same as it would for any medical appointment, and that is not visible to academic staff.
Only the plan details. Postdocs and visiting scholars are frequently on Wellfleet-administered coverage, which I am also in-network with. Clinically the work is the same, though the pressures tend to be different — postdoc years have their own particular kind of uncertainty.
Then please use a service built for that rather than waiting for an appointment. 988 reaches the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline any hour of the day, and Stanford has same-day urgent options for students. I work best with things that unfold slowly, not with emergencies.