ABOUT
“the voice of a generation”
get to know Pooja.
Dr. Pooja Lakshmin MD is a best-selling author, board-certified psychiatrist, keynote speaker, and a contributor to The New York Times.
Dr. Lakshmin’s numerous New York Times essays, including the viral How Society Has Turned its Backs on Mothers and Saying No Is Self-Care for Parents’ have been read and shared by millions. As a women’s mental health thought leader, she has been featured by top media outlets like Good Morning America, The Today Show, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, and many more.
Her debut book, REAL SELF-CARE: Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble-Baths Not Included, was named an NPR Best Book of 2023 and is a national best-seller. She was recently featured on The Ezra Klein Show, discussing her philosophy for pursuing real self-care in a society where commodified wellness fails us personally and collectively (Boundaries, Burnout and the Goopification of Self-Care).
A Philly native, Dr. Lakshmin now lives in Austin Texas where she maintains a private telepsychiatry practice through which she takes care of patients dealing with burnout and perfectionism, as well as clinical conditions like depression and anxiety. Dr. Lakshmin holds a summa cum laude BA in women’s studies and the biological basis of behavior from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MD from Jefferson Medical College. Dr. Lakshmin completed her internship and first year of psychiatry residency training at Stanford and went on to finish her adult psychiatry residency at George Washington University, where she focused on global mental health and perinatal psychiatry. She has been on the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at George Washington University School of Medicine since 2016.
In 2019, Dr. Lakshmin founded her private psychiatry practice in Washington DC and, begin writing for The New York Times. Around this time, Dr. Lakshmin began bringing her unique ideas about the intersection of mental health, gender, and social determinants of health to social media. In five short years, Dr. Lakshmin has cultivated a platform of hundreds of thousands of followers, and a reputation as one of the most sought after mental health experts in the country. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lakshmin founded the women’s mental health digital education platform Gemma, which, over the course of four years, educated thousands of women about perinatal psychiatry and women’s mental health conditions.
Dr. Lakshmin has been invited onto the stages of Google, LinkedIn, Booz Allen, Peloton, Neuberger Berman, Penn Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, Harvard Law School, Aspen Ideas, SXSW and many others to teach her signature framework for Real Self-Care in the Workplace. She also sometimes works as a consultant designing mental health programming for companies and organizations.
When she is not writing, reading, speaking, or taking care of patients, Pooja enjoys watching Daniel Tiger with her toddler, eating her partner Justin’s sour cream enchiladas, and taking orders from her two cats, Kitty and Fifi.