Tatiana Vera (she/her/Ella)

Dr. Tatiana Vera is a compassionate, culturally responsive therapist who specializes in helping adolescents and adults navigate depression, substance use, neurodivergence, emotional dysregulation, and other complex mental health concerns. She earned her PhD in Counseling Psychology from Columbia University, where she completed a concentration in Bilingual Latinx Mental Health.

Dr. Tatiana has trained across inpatient, intensive outpatient, community mental health, integrated healthcare, telehealth, and family-based settings. Her extensive hospital experience includes providing individual and group therapy to children, adolescents, and adults experiencing depression, suicidality, self-harm, trauma, substance use, and significant emotional or behavioral distress. She brings a calm, nonjudgmental presence to therapy and is comfortable supporting clients whose needs may feel complicated, overlapping, or difficult to put into words.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is central to Dr. Tatiana’s clinical approach. She helps clients better understand their emotions, interrupt harmful or ineffective patterns, tolerate distress, navigate relationships, and build lives that feel more stable and meaningful. She also draws from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Motivational Interviewing (MI), and Internal Family Systems-informed treatment, adapting treatment to each client’s needs, strengths, learning style, and goals.

Dr. Tatiana is particularly passionate about working with people experiencing depression. Her approach balances genuine validation with practical strategies, helping clients reconnect with their values, strengthen coping skills, and take manageable steps toward greater engagement and hope.

She also brings substantial experience supporting people affected by substance use. Before earning her doctorate, Dr. Tatiana spent several years working within Montefiore Medical Center’s Division of Substance Abuse, where she provided clinical supervision, health education, care coordination, and recovery-oriented support. Her work included serving individuals receiving opioid treatment, developing bilingual support programming, training and mentoring peer educators, and contributing to overdose-prevention and harm-reduction initiatives. She has also conducted and published research involving people who use drugs, hepatitis C treatment, naloxone education, and barriers to sustained medical care. She approaches substance use without shame or judgment, with an emphasis on readiness for change, harm reduction, recovery, and the broader emotional and social factors that shape behavior.

In her work with neurodivergent clients, Dr. Tatiana provides affirming, individualized care that respects different ways of thinking, communicating, processing emotions, and experiencing the world. She has training in gold standard assessment measures for Autism Spectrum Disorder and ADHD, which allows her to provide excellent psychoeducation to neurodivergent folks. Rather than viewing neurodivergence solely through a deficit-based lens, she helps clients understand their patterns, recognize their strengths, reduce shame, and develop strategies that fit the way their minds work. She also supports parents seeking a more compassionate and effective understanding of their neurodivergent child or teen.

Dr. Tatiana provides therapy in both English and Spanish and is especially committed to serving Latinx, immigrant, bicultural, and first-generation clients and families. Her international training included an intensive Spanish-language clinical practicum in Peru, where she provided mental health education and assessed children’s cognitive development while communicating findings and recommendations to families in Spanish. She recognizes that depression, substance use, identity, and neurodivergence are all experienced within a broader cultural and relational context. Her work honors the roles of language, family, migration, gender, community, and lived experience.

In addition to her clinical practice, Dr. Tatiana is an accomplished educator, researcher, author, and mentor. She has taught courses at Columbia University in group counseling, Latinx psychology, multicultural counseling, counseling and gender, evaluation methods, and college admissions counseling. She has co-authored multiple books and book chapters addressing gender, intersectionality, culturally responsive mentorship, and the experiences of Latinas and other women of color in higher education and STEM. Her peer-reviewed publications have also examined substance use, overdose prevention, healthcare engagement, intimate partner violence, immigrant experiences, and culturally responsive care. Her leadership and service have been recognized by the National Latinx Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association, Columbia University, and Sharp HealthCare.

Dr. Tatiana’s style is warm, relational, strengths-based, and direct when needed. She works collaboratively with clients to understand not only what they are struggling with, but also what their symptoms or behaviors may be communicating and what has helped them survive. Whether a client is living with persistent depression, questioning their relationship with substances, trying to understand their neurodivergence, or seeking concrete DBT skills for managing intense emotions, Dr. Tatiana offers thoughtful, evidence-based care grounded in dignity, curiosity, and hope.