Judy Tsafrir, M.D.

I am a board certified, conventionally trained adult and child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, a Harvard Medical School faculty member, with a private practice of holistic adult and child psychiatry located in Newton, Massachusetts. I have a deep curiosity about development and healing, and have an open mind about trying diverse approaches to help my patients. I am forever learning new things.

I am familiar with working within a traditional medical/psychiatric paradigm, but no longer endorse it. Too frequently suppression of symptoms with pharmaceuticals results in the degradation of health rather than healing. My approach is now oriented to identifying the root cause of illness in the tradition of functional medicine.

Increasingly I have begun to work with many of my patients to help them make the many changes necessary to optimize their health, which will eventually allow them to wean off prescription psychiatric medications or at least to reduce the dosages. This is not always possible, but with a variety of holistic approaches, including attending to the emotional and spiritual dimensions of a person’s life, appropriate diet, healing the immune system via supporting gut health, and rebalancing biochemistry, it is often possible.

I have expertise in treating Environmentally Acquired Illness, specifically mold toxicity. Mold toxicity is largely unrecognized by conventional psychiatry and typically results in symptoms that prompt consultation with a psychiatrist, such as depression, anxiety, fatigue insomnia, and cognitive changes to name a few.