After residency, I served as Lead Outpatient Psychiatrist at the Topeka, KS, Veterans Administration (2018 to 2021). I saw what happens when a system asks clinicians to do the impossible. During the early COVID era, I carried an enormous caseload with minimal support, and it clarified how quickly care can become rushed, impersonal, and unsafe when administrators prioritize output over humanity. That experience, plus later roles in community mental health, emergency telepsychiatry, and inpatient leadership, strengthened my conviction that good psychiatric care requires time, steadiness, and real attunement.

Over the years, I’ve worked across many settings: rural community clinics, jail and ICE detention environments, in-home, emergency departments nationwide, and hospital inpatient units. I’ve been the person called when things were complex, urgent, or messy. I’ve also witnessed how misogyny, racism, classism, and corporate decision-making can distort patient care. In every role, I was told the same thing by colleagues and patients: I was thorough, competent, and genuinely caring; and yet, I kept running into the same wall. The system often makes it harder to practice the kind of psychiatry that actually helps people heal.

That is why I opened my private practice.

I built this practice for people who are tired of being managed in 15-minute fragments. People who are high-achieving, culturally diverse, and carrying more than they let on. The “fixers,” the leaders, the caretakers, the strong ones who have mastered survival, but want more than survival. Many of my patients are navigating insomnia, irritability, disordered eating, panic, nightmares, or a quiet sense of overwhelm that no one else sees. They might be outwardly successful, but inwardly exhausted. They want real options, not just “here’s a pill, see you next month.”

My approach is integrative, relationship-based, and grounded in a simple idea I repeat often: there’s no right or wrong medicine, only what seems best now with the information we have. Medication can be useful, sometimes essential, and I do prescribe thoughtfully, including genetic testing when it truly adds clarity. But healing rarely comes from medication alone. I integrate psychotherapy tools like CBT and motivational interviewing, meditation and guided practices, somatic approaches, and expressive therapy when creativity is part of how you process the world. I also make room for spirituality and meaning, because I’ve learned that people heal faster when their beliefs, culture, and inner life are treated with respect.

If you are wondering what it feels like to work with me, patients often tell me I’m easy to talk to. I’ve been nicknamed “Sunshine” more than once because I show up with warmth, honesty, and a steady belief that things can get better. I start the same way every time: I’ll get to know you as a person first, then we’ll move into what’s hurting. If there are questions you do not want to answer, that is okay. There is no pressure. I want to help.

Outside the clinical space, I am unapologetically a full human. I’m a first-generation Nigerian-American, a partner and a mom, an author and multidisciplinary artist. I publish nonfiction essay and poetry, and I’ve performed storytelling that later became award-winning work. I love deep conversations, beautiful dinners, creative events, trying new things, and the kind of quiet that comes from a good massage, a yoga class, or a real moment of stillness. My husband once described me as “rooted in the physical and spiritual worlds,” and that is accurate. I value evidence-based medicine, and I also respect the unseen parts of being human. I can be the doctor who talks neurotransmitters with precision, and also the one who asks what you believe, what gives you meaning, and what helps you feel connected to something bigger.

This practice is my third space. A neutral ground. A place where you do not have to perform strength. A place to move from coping to thriving, from internalizing stress to self-respect, and from survival mode to self-actualization. If you have felt unseen in psychiatric care before, I want you to know you are not asking for too much. You are asking for what you deserve.