I am a medical anthropologist, sociologist, and mental health doula whose practice grows directly out of years of rigorous research at the intersection of neurodiversity-affirming and critically-oriented psychiatry and psychology, community-based and culturally sovereign healing traditions, and the social science frameworks that situate both within the broader historical, cultural, and institutional forces that shape how we understand and experience mental health. My practice does not position these traditions in opposition — it brings them into dialogue, drawing on the insights each offers while remaining critical of the coercive and pathologizing paradigms that have caused harm within conventional mental health care.

My academic formation at Smith College and the University of Amsterdam trained me to think critically about how mental health systems are built, who they serve, and whose knowledge they erase. My MA thesis examined how decolonial and community-based healing frameworks reveal the clinical gaps left by bioreductionist psychiatry — not as abstract critique, but as a foundation for building something better.

That something better is what I practice as a doula. I built my own mental health doula methodology as the applied practice of my medical sociology and anthropology of mental health training, grounded in decolonial trauma studies, neurodiversity-affirming frameworks, and a deep commitment to consent-oriented, patient-led care.

I come to this work as an autistic, non-binary, Dominican-American person who has navigated psychiatric systems, late diagnosis, and the particular exhaustion of existing in institutions that were never designed with people like me in mind. That navigation — combined with my research, my doula training, and my active lineage traditional medicine training — is what I bring to my clients. As a mental health doula, I accompany people through periods of emotional intensity, life transition, neurodivergent experience, altered states of consciousness, and identity exploration — offering compassionate, autonomy-centered support that makes space for experience to be met with curiosity rather than pathology, honoring self-determination and meaning making, and supporting integration through liberatory mental health research, care practices, and embodied strategies.