With Gratitude - Finding My Voice ❦✧

For Those I Serve

For more than five decades, I have been privileged to serve as a psychiatrist, caring for my patients and their families. For several years I have searched for the right way to give even more to the care I offered.

I knew that I wanted to share more. I wished to better inform my patients and families. I cared for thousands of patients. I read hundreds of books, attended scores of conferences, and studied for oh so many tests and examinations in medicine and psychiatry. Yet my voice lacked something worth reading.

Several weeks ago, I received a review from a single mother, Sarah Northern, whose words deeply touched and singularly moved me. She wrote of her struggles with the challenge of parenting her two children. She wrote of the care her children received. She wrote of her trust in me. Her kind words implied that psychiatry is not only about diagnoses and medications - it is about listening and caring.

I appreciate any kind thank you, yet Sarah did something special. She reminded me of her poignant place in life, as a single mother doing her absolute best in parenting challenging children. She reminded me of how much I love working with parents -married, single, adoptive, and foster parents - giving their children a sense of family.

Yet family is not only biological! Family can be found in adoptive and foster parents, in extended relatives, in lifelong friendships, and communities of care and belonging. Every individual deserves a family as part of our heritage and endowment. In my practice and in my writing, I hope to support each patient in finding and strengthening the sense of family, wherever it is found.

I am deeply grateful for my own family. My wife, Mary Elizabeth, and I have been married for fifty-five years, and we are parents of three and grandparents of seven. Closeness to siblings, many cousins, lifelong friendships are gifts which I received.

With this blog, With Gratitude, my hope is that the reflections and insights I share here will inform and inspire - so that everyone in my care may continue to grow, and each family, in whatever form it takes, may flourish. My writing is meant to enhance my care, informing and inspiring beyond our visits together.

With Gratitude ❦✧

Anthony T. Machi, M.D.

September 7, 2025