Background and Approach
Central to Dr. Meffert’s work is a belief in the importance of deeply understanding patients’ experiences as the starting point for restoring mental health. Striving to connect across a vast array of human perspectives has been a driving force across Dr. Meffert’s life.
In her undergraduate education, Dr. Meffert completed degrees in (comparative) religious studies in addition to a premed curriculum. After college, Dr. Meffert worked in humanitarian aid in Africa. In medical school, she found her ideal in the field of psychiatry, with its focus on detailed understandings of patient experience and empathic, individualized use of science to achieve healing.
After Psychiatry Training at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Dr. Meffert continued treating outpatients and joined UCSF academic Faculty, researching strategies to provide evidence-based mental health care for trauma and depression disorders across many vulnerable populations-e.g., Sudanese asylum seekers/refugees living in Egypt, earthquake survivors in China and HIV-affected communities in East Africa.
Dr. Meffert and her team created the Global Partnership to Enhance Mental Health Care in Low-Income Countries (GEM), a UCSF program in East Africa that researches strategies to deliver evidence-based mental health care with locally available workers. Through GEM, Dr. Meffert has received over $10 million of continuous research funding from the United States Institutes of Health (NIH) and other entities, published more than 30 articles, given numerous International (e.g., WHO, USAID, NIH, AIDS) and Grand Round presentations and received honors and other recognition for her team’s advancement of the field.
As a highly accomplished physician-scientist, Dr. Meffert rapidly interprets data on psychiatric treatments and discerns those which are safe, promising options from those requiring additional research. Dr. Meffert believes strongly in evidence-based care and aims for reciprocal discussion with patients when weighing treatment options—often providing patients with reviews or study information, as desired.
Dr. Meffert’s psychiatric care, including both medication management and psychotherapy work, uses her full array of training to respectfully connect with a diverse range of patients, and crucially, to work collaboratively with them to efficiently improve their mental health.
