Dr. Stephanie Michael Stewart is a holistic psychiatrist with a spiritual, environmental, and social justice perspective. She trained at Spelman, Morehouse School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and served as chief resident in psychiatry at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Dr. Stewart developed and directed the West Central Wellness Center for LA County’s DMH, caring predominantly for people of color. They used culture, community connections, art, nutrition, travel, and other complementary modalities alongside evidence-based psychiatry in healing work. She also does antiracist work with psychotherapists and is passionate about gender-affirming care, particularly within the BIPOC community.
Dr. Stewart grew up traveling extensively. She knows the transformational value of a journey through her personal path to healing trauma. Seeing benefits for patients at the wellness center, she founded Worldwide Wellness and used adventure travel as a therapeutic modality. The fundamentals are immersion in nature, adventure, mindful movement, right relationship as guests, and integration. This model also fits her work in advocacy for the safe and sacred use of entheogens for inner journeys. In her psychedelic work, she focuses on relational health, including appreciation and incorporation of indigenous wisdom and reciprocity in the psychedelic field. She is interested in women’s health and using entheogens for perinatal and perimenopausal stages of life. Her current project is developing training in psychedelic-assisted therapy for psychiatric residents at HBCUs to liberate communities of color further.
She supports patients with ketamine-assisted therapy and serves as a psychedelic advisor to groups in Canada and the US. She completed the MAPS MDMA for PTSD training and is furthering her knowledge through apprenticeship and a CIIS Psychedelic Research and Therapies Certificate.
She is of Black, White, and Native American descent, a certified yoga teacher, and a meditation guide based in Vancouver, Canada, and Los Angeles.