After growing up in urban Northern California and graduating from UC Santa Cruz, Lisa spent 20 years living in rural and remote places. She became a Community Health Practitioner and started a family in a remote community of Alaska. In 2010, she moved to Anchorage to attend MEDEX Northwest, and graduated as a physician assistant in 2012. 

 

She spent the next five years working for Southcentral Foundation’s Fireweed Clinic (Outpatient Community Mental Health). She also provided weekly psychiatric care at Dena A Coy’s residential treatment facility for women with co-occurring disorders, and traveled quarterly to Dillingham to provide psychiatric services there. In 2014, she obtained her Certificate of Added Qualifications (CAQ) in Psychiatry. 

 

In 2018, she transferred to an intermittent position with SCF, traveling to remote villages on an intermittent basis to provide rural primary care. She started part-time at Greatland Clinical Associates in early 2020, to again provide psychiatric care on a regular basis.

 

Lisa’s passions include helping people to improve their sleep, and body image, and facilitating recovery from trauma and substance abuse. She emphasizes the roles of exercise and nutrition in improving mental health overall. On a broader level, she works with clients to improve their sense of connection, in a world affected by rapid changes. She is aware of the unique mental health challenges associated with the rural-urban transition, including both practical and cultural aspects of this. She recognizes, however, that careful diagnosis, and the right medication for the right problem at the right time, can be life-altering, and works collaboratively with patients to achieve wellness using a variety of appropriate tools. 

 

Because Alaska’s wide geographic spread over one time zone affects the sleep and mental health of most of the population, she is an advocate of both starting schools later and ending Daylight Saving Time in the interest of public health; her commentaries on these topics have appeared in ADN.

 

Her favorite book to recommend to clients is The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk. It covers the vast ground of research and understanding that has developed around how the body maps memories of trauma, and discusses a variety of tools for healing.

 

She is also a publisher (Denali Sunrise Publications) of books and book reviews relevant to rural Alaska.