Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. The podcast to help you in your journey

towards becoming a wise, empathic, genuine and connected mental health professional.

I'm your host, Dr. David Puder, a psychiatrist who splits his time practicing psychopharmacology,

individual and group psychotherapy, medical director of a day treatment program,

medical education research, and teaching residents and medical students.

Welcome back to the podcast today. I am joined with Dr. Karolina Asorio, a geriatric psychiatrist.

So after she finished her psychiatry residency, she also went on to finish a fellowship in geriatric

psychiatry. So today we are going to be talking about a special program that Dr. Asorio runs.

It treats people with depression and anxiety who are elderly.

So tell me a little bit about the program and maybe a little bit about the passion

that led to you starting the program. Sure. So basically when I was a resident,

I was doing my rotations in the inpatient unit and we will discharge these patients

and they didn't have any good place to continue following up with their treatments.

So that sort of like planted the seed in my head that there was something more that needed to be done.

So when I went to do my fellowship, I sort of like got a new set of lenses

that allow me to see the importance of older adults to get the treatment that they need.

And so a general outpatient partial program wouldn't benefit them and actually sometimes

it would make them a little worse because older adults tend to become parents to their younger peers in a group.

So when I came back to La Melinda, I said, okay, this is the place where I have to be

so I can develop this program. And so with the support of the administration here,

I was able to create my little project and now we are going on our 30 year

and it just has been really amazing. And I can see the benefit from my patients

...