Dr. Anna Yusim, MD, is an internationally recognized psychiatrist and executive coach with board certification and education from Stanford and Yale (note: can we instead write: “internationally recognized, board-certified psychiatrist and executive coach…” because otherwise it reads that both my board certification & education are from Stanford & Yale). Based in New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, Colorado, California, and Florida, she has a private practice that caters to influential clients, including Forbes 500 CEOs, Olympic athletes, and A-list actors. As a best-selling author of Fulfilled: How the Science of Spirituality Can Help You Live a Happier, More Meaningful Life, Dr. Yusim is dedicated to helping individuals enhance their impact, purpose, and joy in both life and work. Currently, she serves as a Clinical Assistant Professor at Yale Medical School, where she is developing a Mental Health & Spirituality Program in collaboration with Dr. Christopher Pittenger. Additionally, Dr. Yusim is the Chief Medical Officer of Conscious Health, a holistic mental health treatment center in California, and the Medical Lead for SuperMind, a Miami-based mental health start-up. She has contributed extensively to the field, publishing over 320 [note: the # is now 400+] works and frequently appearing in major media outlets such as CNN, Fox News, ABC, and NBC. MysticMag has the opportunity to offer an exclusive interview with Dr. Anna Yusim.
Anna, in your book Fulfilled, you explore the connection between spirituality and mental health. How do you incorporate spiritual principles into your practice, and what impact have you seen on clients who embrace this approach?
For me, working with clients is about meeting them where they are in their spiritual journey. Everyone is at a different place in terms of their interest in and development of spirituality. Some people prefer not to include spirituality in their care at all, which is perfectly fine. In those cases, I focus more on psychological principles, existential questions, and an action-oriented, cognitive-behavioral approach. There’s still a vast amount to work with.
Over time, my practice has naturally developed into a niche at the intersection of mental health and spirituality. Many of the individuals who seek my help are looking to incorporate some form of spirituality into their mental health care. My first step is to understand how spirituality plays a role in their life. I ask about how they were raised, what religious or spiritual traditions they grew up with, and which practices they still follow today. I also explore what new beliefs or practices they may have adopted over time, and what spirituality means to them now.
For me, spirituality encompasses values, meaning, purpose, and personal growth, all of which can take many forms. One of my favorite definitions of spirituality comes from British Professor of Theology, Christopher Cook, MD PhD, who describes it as a universal dimension of the human experience. It can either be a deeply internal, subjective experience or else be an experience as external, beyond-the-self, and transpersonal. At its core, spirituality is concerned with life’s most important questions—love, meaning, values, and purpose.
My goal is to understand where my clients are in their spiritual journey and where they want to go. Together, we navigate this path, hand in hand, towards deeper understanding and healing.
You’ve worked with a diverse range of high-profile clients, including Forbes 500 CEOs and Olympic athletes. What unique mental health challenges do influential leaders face, and how do you help them balance personal fulfillment with professional success?
I often find that it’s lonely at the top, a reality many high-functioning, high-achieving individuals face. On paper, they may seem to have it all—successful careers, exceptional intellect, and remarkable achievements. Yet, because they’re so often brilliant, with minds that move quickly, it’s hard for them to form the deep intimacy that sustains meaningful, long-term connections, whether in personal or professional relationships.
Another common challenge I see in these individuals is perfectionism. To reach the heights they’ve achieved, they often had to be the best—working the hardest and pushing themselves constantly. However, perfectionism brings its own set of problems, including tendencies toward obsessive thinking, procrastination, holding others to similar perfectionistic tendencies, and addiction. Many high-level executives live by the “work hard, play hard” mentality; they know how to give their all in every area of life. But when the work stops, they’re often left with a sense of emptiness. To fill that void, they may turn to substances like drugs or alcohol, or behaviors like sex or workaholism, to cope. This isn’t the case for every high-achiever, but it’s a pattern I encounter regularly in my work.
As for how to help them balance these challenges, it begins with understanding where they want to go. You can’t guide someone anywhere they’re not ready or willing to go, especially when they’re already highly capable individuals. My role is to offer insights, provide guidance, and help them become aware of unconscious patterns that may lead to behaviors that sabotage their success. Often, we work together to uncover these repetitive behaviors. But ultimately, balance has to come from within. And it’s important to remember that balance is a dynamic, ever-shifting entity—what balance looks like for one person is different from what it might look like for another. It’s an ongoing process of fine-tuning to find what feels just right.
Your work spans both traditional psychiatric methods and holistic interventions such as ketamine therapy and transcranial magnetic stimulation. How do you decide which approach is most appropriate for a patient, and how do you integrate these treatments with more spiritual practices?
Yes, you might be referring to the company where I serve as Chief Medical Officer, Conscious Health. We offer a unique blend of ancient wisdom through a psycho-spiritual existential program called the Discovery Model, which is currently being studied at Yale. Alongside this, we incorporate cutting-edge modern science, including a specialized transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) protocol known as Electro-Magnetic Brain Pulsing (EMBP). It’s a specific form of TMS, and we also use ketamine therapy, neurofeedback and vibroacoustic therapy—this is the modern science side of our approach.
Everyone’s journey is unique, so when people come to me, we carefully evaluate what they’ve tried, where they’ve been, and how to proceed. To clarify, I’m both an executive coach and a psychiatrist, and I employ different tools depending on the role. I don’t prescribe medication for my executive coaching clients, but I do for my psychiatry patients when medically indicated. In both roles, I assess the individual holistically using a biopsychosocial-spiritual model. This means we consider the biological, psychological, social, and spiritual factors that may be contributing to their condition.
On the biological side, we explore biological propensities to certain conditions, including family history of mental illness, genetic predispositions, epigenetic factors, medical co-morbidities, and abnormalities in one’s medical labs. Psychologically, we look at how personality patterns, coping skills & habits of mind can contribute to their current conditions. Socially, we examine the role of social supports, family, relationships and loneliness factor into their mental wellbeing. And finally, spiritually, we take a full spiritual history in order to understand how spiritual beliefs and practices may be contributing to what they are feeling.
For instance, if I’m treating a psychiatry patient with a family history of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), or similar conditions, we might look at medications or evidence-based therapies specific to those conditions. But sometimes, after trying multiple failed treatments, individuals may face a diagnosis that is treatment-resistant. That’s when we turn to more novel therapies, like ketamine treatment for treatment-resistant depression or traditional TMS, which is approved for treatment-resistant depression, anxious depression, adolescent depression, OCD and smoking cessation. There is also EMBP, a novel EEG-guided TMS protocol, which can be used for brain optimization and has some preliminary efficacy in the treatment of traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and autism. Many of my executive coaching clients will utilize this powerful technology for brain optimization. We see many high-functioning individuals—CEOs, pilots, athletes, etc.—who are performing well but want to enhance their mental and cognitive functioning even further. Ultimately, it’s about finding what’s appropriate for each individual and ensuring that all approaches are backed by high quality scientific evidence.
As you develop the Mental Health & Spirituality Program at Yale Medical School, what are some of the key elements you hope to bring into the curriculum to bridge the gap between mental health science and spirituality?
The program I’m developing in collaboration with Dr. Christopher Pittenger at Yale has three primary components: research, clinical application, and education.
The research component focuses on the intersection of mental health and spirituality. We’ve already identified several initial research projects, pending funding. The first project will explore the nature of intuition—how we receive information through the intuitive processes of claircognizance, clairvoyance, clairsentience, and clairaudience. The second project examines the spiritual aspects of psychedelic use. Psychedelics not only offer a novel biological mechanism for treating some of the most challenging mental health conditions, but for many, they also serve as a gateway to spiritual connection. We’ll be investigating the spiritual dimension of psychedelic experiences. The third project will explore the neural correlates of spiritual experiences—what happens in the brain when someone has or recalls a spiritual experience, and which parts of the brain are activated. Understanding this will provide deeper insight into why such experiences are meaningful. Beyond these, we plan to conduct research on energy healing modalities and other related topics.
The clinical component will be about integrating spiritual practices, beliefs, and rituals into patient care, informed by both the existing scientific literature on the subject and the research we conduct. One of the key principles at Yale is ensuring that everything we do is science-backed and evidence-based, so any spiritual interventions or ideas introduced into care will have a solid foundation in scientific research.
Finally, the education component will involve conferences, workshops, forums, and summits to share this knowledge globally. The aim is to make this information accessible to professionals and the public alike, ensuring broad dissemination.
Yale has recently granted permission to establish this kind of center, but the criteria are very strict—everything must be firmly grounded in science and validated through rigorous research. With the growing body of evidence showing the connection between spirituality and mental health, it’s an exciting time to be exploring these fields at Yale.
Your travels and studies across 70 countries, including learning from Kabbalah, Buddhist meditation, and South American shamanism, have clearly influenced your work. How have these global spiritual experiences shaped your understanding of human consciousness and healing?
My journey into exploring the concept of the soul began with a deep curiosity about its significance in healing. As a medical professional, I found it puzzling that the term “soul” was never mentioned in my medical school curriculum, residency, or undergraduate studies. It led me to question: Why is no one discussing the soul? This inquiry sparked my desire to travel extensively, seeking knowledge and insights about the soul from various cultures.
I visited ashrams in India to immerse myself in spiritual practices, learned Buddhist meditation in Thailand, collaborated with different shamans in South Africa and South America, and studied Kabbalah in Israel. Most recently, I explored a special form of Buddhism called Vajrayana, or Tantric Buddhism, in the majestic country of Bhutan. All these experiences aimed to deepen my understanding of the soul’s importance in the healing process and to discover how different societies conceptualize it.
One of my favorite definitions of the soul was provided by a Mexican shaman named Fernando. He described the soul as comprising two parts: the first part connects us to everyone and everything, embodying the idea of a unified existence. The second part encapsulates our uniqueness—our individual purpose, experiences, activities, interests, talents, and abilities. I find this definition profoundly insightful, as it emphasizes the dual nature of the soul, highlighting both our interconnectedness and our individuality.
These teachings have greatly informed my practice and shaped the way I approach healing with my patients. Understanding the role of the soul in healing offers a richer, more holistic perspective that acknowledges both the shared human experience and the distinctiveness of each individual’s journey.
If you would like to find out more about Dr. Anna Yusim, please visit https://annayusim.com/
