There may be nothing wrong with you.

A recovering psychiatrist. Author of three books, a writer for Psychology Today, and 450+ conversations on the air. The UnDoctor, and Just Fred to his friends.

Welcome. Pull up a chair. I'm Fred, and everything here is served from one kitchen, with one ingredient: connection.

This is Fred. This is humanity.

For me, it is very clear: connection is at the heart of all healing. Even unconventional connection, when it's attuned. Maybe there's nothing wrong with you, and maybe there never has been.

I grew up in a family full of conflict, and I became the one who brought people back together. Then, in January 1980, my mother handed me a job application: child care worker at a state psychiatric facility for adolescent boys. Those boys were only a few years younger than me. None of us had a recipe for life. And when we connected, they felt heard, they felt seen, and they got better. The medicine was never in the bottle. It was in the connection.

So I became a psychiatrist. Thirty-seven years took me through hospitals and clinics, locum jobs across the country, and two of California's hardest prisons, Pelican Bay and Folsom. More than 30,000 people sat across from me. And everywhere I went, I watched the same thing happen: people taking on their diagnosis as their identity. I call it diagnostic adoption. I like to say I have been quitting psychiatry for forty-six years.

It's not that the system is wrong, it's that I have a different view of how to encounter people than the system tends to emphasize.

For years, I tried to find something that worked, and often I found myself too diffuse in my wishes, desires and creations. Now, as I reach this point in my career and my evolution as an adult, on the verge of gaining some modicum of wisdom, this is what remains. This is what matters.

I'm a Detroiter. For nearly ten years I traveled the country, almost nomadic. It taught me a willingness to be untethered, and it took me to places I would never have seen if I had stayed confined.

Mostly, I'm a host. I make rooms where people feel heard. The cooking comes second.

This is Fred. This is humanity. Welcome to Humanity.

Not a help offer. A clarity offer.

For the quietly capable: people who are functioning well on the outside and feel cluttered on the inside.

Two forty-minute sessions with a ten-minute break between. We gather everything that's there, itemize it, and find your direction. The ninety minutes is simply for the ninety minutes.

Not therapy, and no diagnosis. Book directly, or start with a free conversation.

For a fortunate few: guidance, mentorship and partnership.

For a few choice people, I offer something deeper: an ongoing partnership in guidance, coaching and mentorship, shaped entirely around your life and your work.

It isn't for everyone, and it isn't meant to be. For the right person, it is my honor and my pleasure.

The world is changing fast. Who's writing your life?

Large language models, and everything that follows them, are reshaping who we are. It's undeniable, it's real, and even when it's disturbing, it's simply true.

So now is the time to step in and take sovereignty, agency and authorship for your life. To stay in front of it, so that joy remains an option most of each and every day, even while we're being shifted and reconfigured.

Live like a leaf in the wind, or in the river, and you get whatever the current brings. Most of us are drifting closer to that than we'd like to admit.

And even if you're already taking the bull by the horns, it's always worth having the buttress of a community, or a guide to show you where there may be fat to be trimmed.

From people who have been at the table

IN CONVERSATION WITH Regina Meredith (Fred as her guest) · Robert Whitaker · Sanyika Street · Mark Victor Hansen and Crystal Hansen · Mitzi Perdue

Mark Victor Hansen · 2 min

Dan Clark · speaker endorsement