Opportunities to Collaborate: Part One of a Discussion on the Role of Psychiatry in a Windhorse Therapeutic Environment

Dear Friends,

I hope you enjoyed the previous journal entry about my experiences as a psychotherapist with clients as they navigate their journeys with psychiatrists and medications. Here, we present you with a podcast which continues to explore the subject of medications and the relationship between psychiatry and Windhorse teams. This is a small group discussion between some of Windhorse’s senior clinicians and Dr. Earle Shugerman.

Dr. Shugerman has been a close colleague of Windhorse Community Services for many years. He is the treating psychiatrist for many of our clients, he participates in periodic team meetings, and he consults with our Team Supervisor group once a month.

In this discussion, he offers insights into the uniqueness of the Windhorse approach to supporting clients in their recovery processes. He explains how beneficial it is as an outside treatment provider to have input from the Windhorse team as well as from the client. He answers some intriguing questions from our clinicians, such as how to protect and maintain a wakeful quality of mind while taking psychiatric medications, and how clients can have a sense of their own agency while working with a psychiatrist and a Windhorse team.

The people in this discussion are Jeffrey Fortuna, Gretchen Kahre, Earle Shugerman, myself, and Chuck Knapp, who is our host. We share our various reflections on the collaborative nature of our work together, and we explore current issues in psychiatry as well as how psychiatry is evolving. Many thanks to Dr. Shugerman for being our special guest in this thoughtful conversation.

Thank you for listening,

Jeanne Christensen