Elizabeth O’Connell, M.D., is a female psychiatrist with Healthy Minds NYC in Midtown East, Manhattan. She earned her medical degree from Brown University and is completing her psychiatry residency at Mount Sinai Hospital on the Upper East Side, with training in mood and anxiety disorders across inpatient and outpatient care. She is licensed to practice medicine in New York and Connecticut.

She was in the room before she had the degree

Most psychiatrists reach the therapy room through the classroom. Dr. O’Connell reached it through the emergency department and the delivery room. Before medical school, she spent over a decade as a registered nurse and midwife, including a role as a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner in a Level 1 trauma center. She has already sat with people through genuine crisis, the kind that doesn’t wait for office hours. That history shapes the composure she brings into session. Whether you’re facing a complex personal transition, a high-pressure professional pivot, or evolving family dynamics. Dr. O’Connell is ready to guide you to clarity through psychotherapy and/or medication management.

Where her focus lives now

Dr. Elizabeth O’Connell has a particular interest in the perimenopausal and menopausal years, a stage of life she understands both clinically and firsthand from her years as a nurse and midwife working with women through major physical transitions. For clients navigating the mood shifts, sleep disruption, and cognitive changes that can come with this stage, she offers something rare on any psychiatry team: a female prescriber who has spent her career specifically in women’s health before specializing in psychiatry. She also works with couples and serves as a study therapist in psilocybin-assisted clinical research, helping clients integrate what surfaces there into lasting change.

What it’s like working with her 

Clients notice her plain language right away. She names what she’s observing without hedging, moves at your pace, and treats the parts of your story that don’t fit a clean diagnosis-as usual information rather than a problem to fix first. For a woman who has spent years managing everyone else’s crisis while her own body and mind are shifting under her, she offers a clinical perspective that actually been on both sides of that transition.