You filled out the intake forms. You described what has been happening in a fifteen-minute appointment. Someone nodded, typed, and handed you a prescription. And somewhere on the way home, a question you didn’t say out loud: does anyone actually know what’s happening in my body right now?

That question is where somatic psychiatry starts, and it’s the model Embodied Psychiatry is built around.

Your mind and your body aren't running on separate tracks. Anxiety can show up as a thought that loops, and also as a stomach that drops before you've registered why, or hands that go cold in a room that isn't cold. Trauma can show up in the story you tell about what happened and in the way your body braces a half-second before your brain catches up.

Good psychiatry has always paid attention to the story and the chemistry. Somatic psychiatry keeps both, and adds the body that has been carrying all of it.

What This Actually Means in a Session.

It’s not incense and a gong.

It’s clinical attention to what your body is doing while you talk. Where tension collects. What shifts when a particular memory comes up. How your nervous system behaves under stress compared to at rest. Medication management stays on the table when it’s warranted; somatic work isn’t a replacement for good prescribing, it’s a second source of information.

The biological, psychological, and social threads get pulled in the same visit, because in an actual person they were never separate. What’s happening in your body, what’s happened in your history, and what your life looks like right now all shape what makes sense to do next.

Who is This For?

People who’ve done therapy. Maybe medication too, maybe both, more than once. And something still isn't resolved. Not because they did anything wrong. There may simply be more information worth paying attention to.

It’s also for people newer to care who want a provider who treats the nervous system as relevant rather than incidental.

Mood disorders, anxiety, PTSD, personality disorders, the particular weight of cultural stressors, the stretches that turn into a crisis: your body is in the room for all of it. Somatic psychiatry treats that as clinical information instead of background noise.

What to Expect at Embodied Psychiatry.

LaVeta Jarrett, PMHNP-BC, is a board-certified psychiatric nurse practitioner who built her practice around this way of working: evaluating the biological, psychological, and social factors that shape a person’s mental health, not just the symptom in front of her.

That includes medication management, trauma-informed care, and ketamine-assisted therapy for people whose depression hasn’t moved after several treatments. Ketamine isn’t right for everyone, and whether it fits starts with an evaluation. The medicine is also only part of it. Preparation and integration are where a lot of the work happens.

Whatever the plan turns out to be, you’ll hear the reasoning behind it, the risks, and the trade-offs. You get to ask questions and disagree.

Care is available in person in Wichita, or by telehealth anywhere in Kansas.