About Dr. Naim
Dr Omid Naim MD was born in Tehran, Iran just before the Iranian Revolution in 1978. This early childhood experience of trauma shaped my appreciation of how unresolved trauma and grief can lead to chronic illness in an individual and family, and how easily it gets neglected as the root cause of so much mental illness in our society. My family experiences of being part of a large inter-dependent extended family and community also informed me of how belonging and meaning are the foundational pieces of healing and health. This is what I want to share with others by building spaces, movements, and institutions that sustain our health and resilience through self-empowerment, community, and meaningful values.
EXPERTISE
Adult, Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
CREDENTIALS
M.D. (studied medicine at Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California)
TRAINING INSTITUTIONS
General Psychiatry Residency UCSF, Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship UCSF, Integrative Medicine Fellowship at Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona
WHY DID I CHOOSE THE FIELD OF MENTAL HEALTH?
My family upbringing, my own struggles as a youth with depression and anxiety, the joy of being of service to others, and a deep curiosity about the mind and the nature of story, consciousness and meaning.
SOMETHING INTERESTING ABOUT ME
I read several books at once and almost never finish any of them.
WHAT MADE ME WANT TO JOIN THE HOPE TEAM AND PRACTICE IN THIS MODEL?
Going through Western medical training and psychiatry training I felt uneasy with the profound reductionism of the field. People were not getting better, accumulating diagnoses and medicines, all in the name of ‘being stable’. I felt called to create a more empowering approach that believed in the transformative power of the human spirit as the heart of how we derive meaning and health.