Norman Alessi MD
Founder | PsychiatristHello, My name is Dr. Norman Alessi. Before starting Alessi Psychiatry and Life Center, I practiced for 40 years and helped build one of the foremost Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Departments in America at the University of Michigan Medical School. Even with the vast resources available at the University, I came to understand the profound discrepancies that existed between the potential and realization of the practice of clinical psychiatry and how much worse it was in the private sector. I founded the center to provide a high standard of care in the private sector. I am proud to guide therapists with extensive clinical experience and expertise who are committed to patients and the maintenance of hope as our central priorities. We chose Ketamine from among several innovations in psychiatry due to its potential for rapid implementation and significant impact. Our choice of Ketamine has not only given us a new therapeutic intervention but also a tool by which we can better understand major mental disorders. We have chosen to administer Ketamine infusions ourselves because we want to better understand the impact that Ketamine has during the infusion and subsequently during the integration phase. Although, handing off our patients to Ketamine clinics managed by anesthesiologists or ER doctors would have been easier, it would have deprived us of one of the most significant experiences I have encountered. To have read in the medical literature that a patient's depression could improve within hours or days was impressive, but this reporting was dwarfed by experiencing a patient’s loss of depression at their bedside in a matter of minutes. To date, most infusions have been done at infusion clinics which lack the clinical sophistication that our group has in clinical observations, phenomenological characterizations, and case conceptualization. To our knowledge, this is rarely done by psychiatrists. My having experience as a child and adolescent psychiatrist as well as a general psychiatrist further opens potential opportunities for innovative care. We hope our experience will open the eyes of many other psychiatrists and provide a higher quality clinical experience for patients that are seeking help. Sincerely, Norman E. Alessi