Pondworks Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

Pondworks Psychiatry and Psychotherapy has served the greater Austin community since 2004. We are a physician-led practice built as a deliberate alternative to the dominant model of high volume psychiatric care — the 15-minute med check, the absentee supervising physician, the checkbox visit. We do not practice that way, and we do not believe our patients should have to settle for it.

Pondworks Psychiatry and Psychotherapy has served the greater Austin community since 2004. We are a physician-led practice built as a deliberate alternative to the dominant model of high volume psychiatric care — the 15-minute med check, the absentee supervising physician, the checkbox visit. We do not practice that way, and we do not believe our patients should have to settle for it.

The clearest way to describe what makes Pondworks different is to describe what happens when patients are not in the room. Our team — Dr. Kim, our Psychiatric Nurse Practitioners, and our Physician Assistants — invests over 500 hours each year in dedicated clinical supervision and education. Dr. Kim personally leads six hours of weekly supervision, including our bi-weekly Clinical Inquiry meetings, where the team works through real cases, current research, and the relational frameworks that shape how we treat people. You will be hard-pressed to find another Austin psychiatric practice that uses Advanced Practice Providers (APPs) and offers this depth of ongoing clinical education in relational psychology. It is the engine behind everything else we do.

We call our approach Psychodynamically-Informed Medical Care, and we mean it literally. Every member of our clinical team is trained to look beyond the symptom checklist and to understand the patient as a whole person with a history, a context, and a relational world. Medication, as a helpful tool, is prescribed thoughtfully and in service of a larger plan. Psychotherapy, whether delivered here or in collaboration with an outside therapist, is treated as the work that drives durable change. The therapeutic alliance is not a nicety in our model. It is the treatment.