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“Hello, I’m Dr. Jennifer Reid. I’m a board certified psychiatrist with a practice in Philadelphia. I grew up in rural North Dakota in the family of a father who was a family medicine practitioner. He saw patients in our local hospital, as well as around our corner of the state. My maternal grandfather was also a physician, carrying his black medicine bag into people’s homes to try and help them with their issues. My grandmother was his wife and his nurse. They worked together in a local clinic. She gave the painless shots to the children of the town. As I was growing up, I always thought being a physician would be the coolest thing, a way to really help people and really learn information. That was incredibly interesting. I studied science throughout college and then attended medical school in New York City at Columbia University. As I was approaching the end of medical school, I was trying to figure out which specialty I might be interested in.
I thought about internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry. In the end, I decided I wanted to work in women’s health and so applied and was accepted to an internal medicine residency at UCLA. However, as I was going through my intern year, I began to recognize that it was patients’ response to their illness and the stories of their lives that really most interested me. And so I was able to switch into a psychiatry residency, also at UCLA, during my second year of residency. After finishing there, I did an additional year learning how to treat complex mood disorders, such as depression or bipolar disorder, and working on a number of research studies there. I worked for LA County for several years and worked with west LA’s partially homeless patient population, and those who were struggling with substance abuse and chronic mental illness. I also worked in New York for a year in a Midtown Manhattan group practice, doing psychotherapy for individuals that came in there.
I spent five years at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Psychiatry, working in the outpatient clinic, where I saw patients and taught residents how to provide psychiatric care, and also as a consultant in the family medicine department at University of Penn, where I helped the residents and attendings there with any complex psychiatric illness, including how to adjust medications or referrals that might be beneficial for the residents and patients.
After that, I was part of the Abramson Cancer Center, where I was a psychiatrist seeing patients who may be struggling, understandably, with some of the challenges they faced as they were receiving cancer treatment, or even after. I left University of Pennsylvania in 2019 to open my own practice, though I still supervise residents there. I recently have also joined the clinical faculty at Cooper Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, where I’m planning to help the family medicine department there with psychiatric information as well. In my private practice, I see patients one-on-one and I’ve really enjoyed this part of my career.
What I’ve recognized, however, as we were going through the pandemic, is that I really wanted to try and do more. I thought about myself in rural North Dakota when I was younger and how hard it would have been for me to find a psychiatrist or a therapist that could help. And I wanted to be able to communicate some of this information to those who don’t have access to high quality psychiatric care or psychotherapy. So that’s one of the reasons I was excited to join Doctorpedia and start sharing some of the information in blogs and articles and videos that I think can be most helpful for people who may be struggling with anxiety, depression, insomnia. I also started a blog at thereflectivedoc.com where I write essays about my experiences as a psychiatrist, some of the tools that I use to help my patients and even some of my own challenges as I’ve become a working mom, staying at home and working from my home office and still trying to take good care of my patients.
Another thing I’ve decided to do is the Reflective Doc podcast, which is going to be similar, and I may be interviewing other physicians and therapists, individuals who might be able to share their own tools or recommendations for patients. So I hope that this can be a helpful place for you to find resources and information that’s based on data and based on evidence. I hope you enjoy the writing that I put onto my site, and I wish you could help. Take care.”
