Careful, watchful, without judgment

The word behind the practice

Tentie is an old Scots word. It means attentive, careful, watchful — the quality of paying close and patient attention to what is actually in front of you. It is not a word anyone searches for, and it was chosen anyway, because it names the thing this practice is organised around.

Time is a clinical tool, not a courtesy

A ninety-minute first appointment is not a luxury feature. It changes what gets found. Medication histories are long and non-linear. Sleep, alcohol, grief, thyroid function, a head injury fifteen years ago, a parent’s illness — the details that reorganise a diagnosis rarely arrive in the first ten minutes. They arrive once someone has stopped feeling rushed.

The same is true of follow-ups. A twenty-five minute medication check is enough when treatment is working. When it is not, the appointment needs to be longer, and here it can be.

Mind and body are one chart

A significant number of psychiatric presentations have a medical contributor that has never been ruled out. Thyroid dysfunction, B12 and iron deficiency, sleep apnea, chronic pain, perimenopause, and the side effects of cardiac, steroid and neurological medications can all produce symptoms that look exactly like a primary psychiatric disorder.

Dr. Torrijos reviews your medical history and current medications as part of the psychiatric evaluation, and will recommend laboratory work or coordination with your other physicians where it is warranted. Treating a thyroid problem as depression helps nobody.

You decide, and you decide informed

Treatment options are presented with their reasoning, their expected benefits, their real side effects and their alternatives — including the alternative of waiting. Nobody is pressured into starting a medication in the room. If you want to think about it, go home and think about it. If you want to talk to your family first, do that.

The practice does not measure success by how quickly a prescription is written.

Care without a cultural filter

Dr. Torrijos trained and practised in emergency and outpatient psychiatry serving highly diverse populations in Brooklyn and Houston. That experience shows up as a specific competence: reading distress accurately across cultural, linguistic and religious lines, and not mistaking a difference in expression for a difference in severity.

Patients are met without judgment regardless of cultural background, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religious belief or sexual orientation. Care is available in full in English and Spanish.

Why we don’t take insurance

This is the question people ask most, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a euphemism.

Insurance contracts shape clinical care in ways patients rarely see. Reimbursement rates make short appointments a financial necessity. Authorisation requirements can push a clinician toward documenting a diagnosis before it is settled. And every claim filed puts your psychiatric diagnosis into a database you do not control.

Operating outside those contracts means appointments are as long as the clinical situation requires, the diagnosis is whatever the evidence actually supports, and your record stays between you and your physician unless you choose otherwise.

It also means care costs money up front, and that is a real trade-off, not a hidden one. Every fee is published, and a superbill is provided on request so you can seek out-of-network reimbursement from your own carrier.