We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lanre Dokun, MD a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lanre, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Looking back at internships and apprenticeships can be interesting, because there is so much variety in people’s experiences – and often those experiences inform our own leadership style. Do you have an interesting story from that stage of your career that you can share with us?

In medicine, future doctors must first complete undergraduate courses, take a medical admissions exam, complete medical school and then enter into specialty training known as residency. As a psychiatrist, our residency program is a bit longer than average because frankly you learn very little about psychiatric practice in medical school. One interesting thing about residency is that you can become a licensed medical doctor after your first year. And once licensed you are allowed to start moonlighting at various understaffed institutions around your area. For me, this was a remarkable experience. I had the opportunity to work with so many underserved individuals in our community who otherwise may not have had access to quality care. I was deeply impacted by how much patients valued and appreciated seeing a doctor who looked like them or who they felt could really understand where they were coming from. So much of what I learned about being a psychiatrist and how to provide care tailored to the needs of the patient in front of me, was informed by my time outside of my formal training and working directly with patients in the community. These were a set of experiences that I wouldn’t trade for anything and which continue to influence the physician I am today.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a Nigerian born immigrant who came to the US at age 5. I grew up in NYC, first in The Bronx and then in Queens. I think where you grow up, the things you see, the people you rub elbows with each day, really matter in forming the person you become as an adult. From early childhood, as an immigrant and a child of immigrants, I had an ambitious vision for my life and was highly motivated to achieve that vision. I knew I wanted to be doctor well before I really knew what that path truly entailed. My aspirations to make something of myself were heavily aided by my admittance to Prep for Prep, a non-profit organization that helps place students from the inner city into competitive private preparatory schools throughout the country. This admission opened up a world of opportunity that I would otherwise have never been able to access and set me on the path to graduating from an Ivy League University and completing medical training and residency at one of the country’s best programs.

I believe that my personal recipe of experiences has placed me at a unique advantage when it comes to working with my clients. As a board certified psychiatrist whose focus is in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and medication management for Anxiety, Depression, Financial Therapy and ADHD treatment, my clinical training and academic credentials are of course very important. But, I also find that my ability to connect with the experiences of my clients is profoundly impactful. So many of my clients are in high stress, highly competitive work environments but also come from under resourced, underserved and underrepresented backgrounds. Often they may be the first in their family to attain their level of accomplishment or may be the only person in their office who looks like them. Whether they are dealing with imposter syndrome or simply feel that they don’t have many peers with whom they can connect, knowing that their psychiatrist understands both their professional context as well as their social/cultural context allows people to entrust me with their care.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Corporate environments can feel soulless and working for a large company can feel a lot like being a cog in a machine. As a physician, you really get your own taste of this when completing residency training at a hospital in the country’s largest city. Once my training was complete, I was therefore eager to do something quite different. While private practices are not rare in my field, I wanted to start the type of practice that I would have wanted to work for in those prior years. As a business owner and the director Healthy Minds NYC, I have strived to create the kind of work environment that practices what it is that we preach to our patients. We value work/life balance at the same time that we strive to provide top tier care for our clients. I individually supervise every one of our team members so that they always have the opportunity to raise issues or concerns. It also allow me to address those concerns promptly and directly. I believe that maintaining high morale in small business is not about telling employees that they are family, it is really about being transparent about things like compensation and following through on any of the promises that are made when they are hired. I believe it is relatively easy to retain people when you treat them as ends in and of themselves, rather than simply a means to making a profit. I admit that at larger scale, it may be harder to adhere to these principles, but this is also why I have kept my practice at a manageable size. There is no one who works at my practice who does not get face to face time with me and no one has to feel like they are simply a cog in the machine.

Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?

If I had the opportunity to do it all over again, I would have likely ended up in my field even sooner. For those who are passionate about creating real change in the lives of people while retaining the ability to call their own shots, psychiatry is an amazing field. I believe there are few fields that are more important in today’s world than the broader field of mental health. I love that, as a medical doctor, I am equipped with a multitude of tools with which to aid my prospective clients. My focus is in psychotherapy but also have the ability to utilize medication as needed. As a private practitioner I am able to further sub-specialize and focus in my unique areas of interest which include the specific challenges faced by underrepresented populations in the world of banking, consulting, tech start-ups and beyond. I enjoy working with clients around creating and accomplishing their broader life vision beyond the workplace as well as exploring how their upbringings may influence their self-perception and expectations for their lives. For me, there is truly no more interesting field and it presents a new challenge every single day of the week.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.healthyminds.nyc