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© Natalie D'Onofrio

Pooja Lakshmin, MD

Pooja Lakshmin MD is a board-certified psychiatrist, New York Times contributor, and a leading voice at the intersection of mental health and gender, focused on helping women and people from marginalized communities escape the tyranny of self-care. In 2020, Lakshmin founded Gemma — a physician led women’s mental health education platform centering impact and equity. She maintains an active private practice, where she treats women struggling with burnout, perfectionism, and disillusionment, as well as clinical conditions like depression and anxiety. Having gone down the rabbit hole of extreme wellness herself, Real Self-Care is Lakshmin's answer to the juice cleanses, the gratitude lists, and the bubble baths -- not only to care for ourselves for real but, in turn, to transform our broken culture.

Books

Rethink Wellness with Radical Acceptance

Sometimes it feels like wellness culture is made for the already well: those with thin able bodies, disposable income, oodles of spare time, and decent mental health. For the rest of us, the standards of “wellness” can feel unreachable, often bound up in existing biases against race, class, gender, ability, and body size. Even if

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