What Is Integrative Mental Health?

At Well Clinic, we offer a unique, collaborative approach to health and wellbeing … which we call Integrative Mental Health.

Building a suite of services and modalities around psychotherapy as the core treatment, we invite you to draw on your own sense of wellbeing as the most important voice in the conversation.

As practitioners – whether therapists, acupuncturists, bodyworkers, naturopaths or nurse practitioners – we place the highest diagnostic value on your own experience of “how you are doing,” and we strive to support you in becoming more fully attuned to this sense in yourself.

The Quest For Wellbeing

In a New York Times op-ed piece titled, “If You Feel O.K., Maybe You Are O.K.”, H. Gilbert Welch, MD argues that we may have gone too far down the road of letting science determine whether we are sick or well. Now, he emphasizes – and we concur – that there is enormous benefit to be gained from  scientific advances in the field of health and medicine, and the scientific basis of these professions is sound.  But there is a growing movement in support of the idea that this alone is not enough.  We need also to learn to trust – and refine – our own wisdom and insight about ourselves and our health.

Where we may differ from Dr. Welch is that we see value in psychotherapy, not just as a treatment of necessity for those in crisis or living with mental illness and trauma, but also as an integral component of a healthy lifestyle. It may make sense not to add to our own stress and anxiety (or, for that matter, support the medical-industrial complex) by going in for “preventive” screening for disease when we are apparently well.

But, it is also true that most of us, while considering ourselves essentially healthy, struggle to manage our stress, suffer from bouts of depression or anxiety, experience conflict and tension in our relationships, live with unresolved feelings about past experiences, and let ourselves be guided by fear in making life decisions – to name just a few examples.

In other words, there is much that each of us can gain by actively managing our mental and emotional wellbeing.  And, of course, there are many, many ways to do this besides sitting (or lying) on a therapist’s couch.

Integrative Mental Health in San Francisco

At Well Clinic, we support you in pursuing any and all of these activities, as you see fit, in promoting and increasing your own sense of wellbeing.  We don’t lead hikes, direct plays, or cook healthy meals for you (at least, not yet…), but we would like to help you put together a mix of services that can support you on your way – and we do it all under one roof.

Our Vision of Integrative Mental Health:

• Prioritizes the client’s own sense of wellbeing as the starting point for treatment
• Focuses on health and healing – treating the whole individual, not just the disease
• Offers an individualized, client-centered approach, emphasizing partnership and collaboration between practitioner and client
• Emphasizes a balance between skillful treatment of acute and chronic conditions, and maintenance of health and wellbeing
• Educates and empowers the client to play an active role in his or her own health and wellbeing, supporting and encouraging a balanced and sustainable lifestyle
• Addresses the full range of emotional, mental, physical, social, spiritual and environmental influences that affect health
• Draws from diverse and complementary traditions and approaches to health and wellness – from the latest scientifically and empirically supported treatments to the wisdom of centuries-old healing traditions
• Privileges the natural movement toward wholeness in our mind, body and spirit

About the Author

<>Alex Momtchiloff is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) at Well Clinic in San Francisco. He specializes in working with individuals, couples and families … and offers therapy in French and English.