Based in Texas, Dr. Jeremy Orgel is Board-certified in Adult Psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He is the president and sole practitioner of a private outpatient psychiatric practice serving adult and adolescent patients throughout Texas and California via telehealth video. In this capacity, he provides psychodynamic psychotherapy, psychiatric consultations and diagnostic evaluations, and psychiatric medication management. In 2023, Dr. Jeremy Orgel joined Woodlands Internists as a staff psychiatrist. His responsibilities in this position entail the psychiatric care of roughly 50 patients at this primary care internal medicine practice, many of whom are dealing with multiple mental health challenges. Dr. Jeremy Orgel has extensive experience with the care of adolescent psychiatric patients. During his 25 years with the McAuley Neuropsychiatric Institute at St. Mary’s Medical Center, he provided direct care to patients ages 11 to 17 who had been hospitalized for psychiatric emergencies. He also served there as Medical Director for five of those years.
A member of the Houston Psychoanalytic Association and a graduate psychoanalyst of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, Dr. Orgel completed a psychiatric internship and residency with the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his medical degree from the New York University School of Medicine. In addition to his post-graduate premedical curriculum at Columbia College, he holds a BA in comparative literature from Columbia College and a MA in English and comparative literature from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Columbia University.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
On a typical workday, I wake up early, around 7 am, read the news for a few minutes, then exercise: swimming in the spring, summer, and fall, and yoga or a long walk in the winter. After that, I eat a healthy breakfast between 9 am to 10 am. I usually start meeting with my patients via video around 10 am, which is 8 am on the West Coast where most of them live. I work until around 3 pm then take two hours off to cook and eat my main meal of the day, read, catch up on phone calls, etc., then I start working again around 5 pm until 7 pm or 8 pm. After that, I’ll eat a small meal or a snack and wind down. I like to read: fiction, non-fiction, the New Yorker, etc.or watch the occasional film or TV series before bed. If my mind is still active from my workday, I may meditate briefly before I go to sleep, ideally around 10:30 pm to 11 pm. Weekends are for seeing friends and family or catching up with them on the phone, reading, and exercising in a more leisurely way, birding, and spending time in nature, doing errands, paying bills and doing paperwork, reading professional publications, and doing continuing education activities, shopping, and cooking a few things for the week ahead, or spending an evening enjoying the many dining, music, and film options that Austin has to offer. By staying focused on what I’m doing and completing one task before starting another, I am able to use my time productively. Also, by first doing the things that I don’t enjoy doing and then rewarding myself with activities that I love, I stay motivated.
How do you bring ideas to life?
When something interests or excites me, I try to learn as much as I can about it and find ways to connect with people who have a lot of experience—or at least more than I do—with the idea. I want to hear their opinions and insights before testing them out. In my work, it is very important to review the latest and most rigorous research before trying a new approach to helping my patient. Examples could be a medication that I haven’t prescribed before or using one that I’m already familiar with for a new indication. It could also mean employing a different method of doing psychotherapy that I haven’t used before, or utilizing a novel way of arriving at a diagnosis or conceptualizing a patient’s problems. Once I have started to bring the idea to life in my clinical work, I rely upon my patients’ feedback and on my own observations of their progress to determine if it was helpful and worth incorporating into my regular practice or not—and if so, what modifications I should make in order to improve it.
What’s one trend that excites you?
One trend that still excites me, but which is not particularly new or cutting-edge is the development and use of telemedicine. It is possible for physicians and other healthcare providers like me to work with and help patients who may live far away or lack transportation or the ability to come to an office to meet with me. Like most of my colleagues, I started using telemedicine video in my practice during the COVID pandemic. I have continued to do so ever since. My practice has grown from a small one based out of my office in San Francisco to a larger one in which I work with patients throughout California and Texas from my home office in Austin, Texas.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
I am pretty good at not procrastinating. I make a habit of doing my most onerous tasks first, then rewarding myself for having done them, then moving on to the things that I find to be easier and more pleasurable to work on. I often find myself advising my patients, many of whom struggle with procrastination, to do the same. Making sure that I get adequate sleep also helps me be productive because when I’m rested, my mind works better and I can work more efficiently.
What advice would you give your younger self?
I would give my younger self lots of advice. If only I could go back and redo some things! I regret that when my kids were young—they are now in their 20s—I didn’t spend as much time with them because I was very focused on building and sustaining my career. Often, when I was at home with them during the evenings or on weekends, I was tired from working and not as energetic and engaged with them as I wished I could have been. So I would tell myself to work a bit less and make sure to spend more time with my family. I would also tell myself not to worry so much about making a decent living. I could have still had a robust career and afforded a good life even if I had worked a few hours less every week. It would have been better for me and for my family, as well.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you on?
I’m not sure that nobody agrees with me, but I feel strongly that people don’t do themselves or their close relationships any favors when they rely on texting for communication. I believe that it is so much better to have a real-time conversation, either in-person or by video or phone. I have seen many people’s relationships suffer when their primary mode of communication is texting. It is so easy to misinterpret the other person’s tone in a text message, or to jump to conclusions about their intentions based on whether they respond to your message or how they take to do so. Without the social cues of tone of voice, inflection, facial expression, body language, etc., we are so limited in what we are able to actually understand about the other. I often tell my younger patients to just stop texting and make a phone call or pay a visit to the other person instead. They often look at me as if I’m just some older person who is out of step with the times and doesn’t know how things are done these days. Oh well. I’ll just keep harping on this point until I’m blue in the face.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
I take every opportunity that I can to get out into the nature. For most of my life, I have done that, and it never fails to bring me joy and a feeling of tranquillity. I turn my attention to what my five senses are showing me and I stop thinking about whatever might be troubling or preoccupying me. I forget about myself for awhile and then return home feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and able to take on life’s daily challenges again.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
See above. When I’m overwhelmed or unfocused, I like to take a walk outdoors or perhaps go for a swim. If those options are not available, I take break from what I’m doing, lie down, turn off the lights, close my eyes and focus on my breathing, which I try to slow down. I notice where my muscles are tense and try to relax them. I work on focusing my awareness on the present moment. I wouldn’t say that I’ve mastered these mindfulness techniques, but I’m working on them and may well keep doing so for the rest of my life.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
I don’t know if this would count as a “strategy” per se. Throughout my career, I have been very quick to respond to phone calls, emails, and inquiries from my patients and prospective patients and from my colleagues. I believe that in doing so, I have cultivated a reputation for being prompt, reliable, and responsive, which has helped people to trust me and the work we do together.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
Without getting too personal, I would say that my professional failures have often occurred when I have decided to work with patients despite having a gut feeling that it would not be a good fit for me or for them. In other words, I tried to ignore or override my intuition and pushed myself to work with them anyway. The obvious lesson is to listen to my gut and not ignore what it may be telling me. While I may not know why I’m getting an uneasy or bad feeling when I do a first consultation with a prospective patient, I have learned over the course of my career that it is essential for me to pay attention to this “sixth sense.” Consulting with colleagues, engaging in my own psychotherapy, and seeking clinical supervision have all helped me to understand my own emotional reactions to patients, and to recognize when they are predictive of problems or potential treatment failures, thus helping me to know when to say no to working with certain patients. Self-awareness is essential to doing my work successfully. For me, the work of self-examination is never finished. Although I don’t expect that I’ll never encounter failures in my future work, I do believe that I’m better equipped to prevent them.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
I think that an enterprising psychiatrist who is interested and skilled in technology should try to develop an online network of psychiatrists who could make themselves available to provide coverage for each other when they go on vacation or need to take leave from work. Perhaps they would pay a small membership fee to join the network, and maybe there could be some way to provide payment for coverage. I’m not much of an entrepreneur, so I’ll leave it up to others to figure out a business model for this enterprise that would make it viable and successful.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
I use DrChrono Electronic Health Records (EHR) system for all of my scheduling, record-keeping, and prescribing, and increasingly for communicating with my patients and other clinicians. It has made my practice run in a much more smooth, efficient, and organized manner.
What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?/
The best $100 I recently spent was on dinner with someone I love.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast you’ve gotten a ton of value from and why?
I don’t listen to podcasts, but I love to read a wide variety of literary fiction as well as nonfiction in areas that interest me, such as politics, history, nature, and psychology. I learn as much about human nature from reading a good novel as I do from any other kind of book or article. Do I have to pick a favorite? I can’t. There are too many.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
When I was a kid, I saw A Hard Day’s Night, the original movie with the Beatles, countless times. Recently, I saw it. It was as enjoyable as I had remembered it. The music is still wonderful and the Beatles’ humor and charm is still infectious over 60 years since they burst upon the scene and thrilled me when I was a young child.
Key learnings
- Taking good care of your mind and body is essential if your work is about helping others.
- Learning and growing, both personally and professionally, is the hard work that you never finish.
- Take time to value and nurture your relationships no matter how hard you work.
- Professional failures can be quite difficult, yet they present opportunities for growth. They often occur when you ignore or override your gut feelings.
- Nature is sublime and healing. Take time to appreciate it and it will enrich your life and your work.