We’re a team of clinicians and staff who have dedicated our lives to research, education, and treating those with mental health conditions. We’re especially passionate about helping those with Treatment-Resistant Depression and providing the most advanced therapies available, including Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and esketamine nasal spray, both FDA-approved for advanced depression.
Mental health conditions can be profoundly painful and isolating, making it difficult to seek help. Our team provides a unique, patient-centered experience to help you find the appropriate treatment and relief from your symptoms. We’re grateful to be practicing psychiatry during this era in which there are so many new treatment possibilities and new hope for those with mental health conditions.
A few years into medical school, Dr. Ellis was driven to pursue psychiatry after personally witnessing the power of medication plus psychotherapy to provide healing for someone suffering from depression. She saw recovery for patients with mental illness that involved both psychiatry and neurology. She also viewed psychiatry as a way to help people find a more positive outlook on life. In retrospect, this desire to help others began early in life as she has always been an avid volunteer and enjoys helping people feel better.
Dr. Ellis finds a goal-oriented approach is very effective when treating patients. She works with patients to set realistic goals that are attainable during or after each visit. Over time, she finds this helps patients achieve success and positive outcomes. She is seen by patients as being upbeat, and she tends to find positivity at her core.
Her focus on anxiety, depression, psychosis, and PTSD led her to first come across Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), as she saw it provided an additional treatment modality to further help patients achieve a successful outcome in treatment. She sees psychiatric treatment as historically involving medication management, with TMS as the newer, safe, efficacious modality that offers similar success. She is well-versed in helping patients manage their medication regimen and looks forward to adding TMS as another treatment in helping her patients find relief and live happier lives.
She joined Mindful Health Solutions in August of 2017.
Entering medical school, Dr. Stephen Ramondino found he had a wide swath of interests. Biology, psychology, neuroscience and social science all were subjects that piqued his curiosity. He also decided that he wanted to help people who were having struggles in their lives. A confluence of his intellectual interests and his strong commitment to help others led him to psychiatry.
Dr. Ramondino strikes a balance between being kind and engaging with his patients while always striving to let them know he takes their concerns and problems seriously, respectfully and empathetically. He values the importance of the therapeutic relationship. Having worked in a variety of clinical settings, from outpatient clinics to hospitals to private practices, he is well versed in and ready to solve many psychiatric problems. He sees patients sixteen years of age and up.
With his extensive and varied background, he has found that many patients are not able to find desired change or results with medications, psychotherapies, or alternative/complementary treatments alone. He uses Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), an effective treatment with relatively few risks and side effects, as an important tool to utilize in these situations.
He joins TMS in the beginning of 2019.
Palei Alfaro is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who is working at Mindful Health Solutions’ Sacramento clinic as a Psychotherapist. She has a passion for anxiety and depressive disorders. She feels that these areas are what the typical person encounter more often in life, and she has developed an expansive “coping skills toolbox” to address many of the symptoms associated with the diagnosis. She is also interested in behavioral areas like ADHD and mood disorders as well.
As a therapist, she describes her personality as positive, outgoing, and overall bubbly. She is genuinely hopeful and happy in working towards each of her patient’s personal successes. With that, she aims to establish safety, security and stability. Meaning she wants each patient to feel safe, and to understand that she provides a non-judgmental and unbiased space for them to build trust and establish a meaningful therapeutic relationship, and to know that they can depend on consistent and thorough treatment.
Palei Alfaro comes to Mindful Health Solutions because of the cutting edge technology in mental/behavioral health field here. Seeing that, she immediately knew this was the place for her. For years, she had been following and studying advances in treatment for mental health disorders and have always felt that there should be more access to these treatments. Treatments such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) therapy and esketamine treatments allow people to have alternatives to traditional medications, and find something that works for them.