Dr. Stephen
Allison

For nearly a decade I directed an inpatient psychiatric service in Marin County, California, and before that worked in emergency psychiatry — the end of the spectrum where things move fast and the stakes are highest. That experience shaped something I carry into every clinical encounter: the belief that what people need most, even in a crisis, is to feel genuinely held. Most people I met on their worst day got better quickly and moved on. Acute psychiatric illness is often a difficult period in an otherwise full life, not a defining feature of it.

I also helped build a system of care in Marin that let patients move fluidly between levels — inpatient, outpatient, community-based support — coordinated across hospitals, courts, and advocates. That instinct travels with me. Westlake is a specialist clinic, but I think in ecosystems rather than episodes, and I'm actively building relationships with therapists, hospitals, and schools across Hà Nội.

My clinical range is broad by design. Since moving to Vietnam, work with children and adolescents has become an increasingly important part of my practice, alongside a growing interest in neurodiversity, TCK experience, and cultural psychiatry — each person's story, and what it means to them. ADHD & neurodiversity → I move fluidly between approaches — CBT, DBT, and structured work when the situation calls for it; relational and psychodynamic work when that's where the depth is. The frame shifts; the attention to the whole person doesn't.

I previously worked at Hanoi French Hospital, and hold an affiliated faculty appointment at VinUniversity and volunteer clinical faculty status at UCSF. Westlake Psychiatry is the practice I've wanted to build for a long time — one where the appointment is the thing, and the relationship between clinician and patient is treated as clinically significant in its own right.