Who is writing, and why

My name is Christa Smith. I am a licensed clinical psychologist. My work sits at the join between two things that are often kept apart: formal psychological and neuropsychological assessment, and ordinary talking therapy. Assessment tells you what is actually happening — whether attention, mood, cognition or trauma is driving the picture. Therapy is what you do about it. Doing one without the other tends to produce either a very precise report nobody acts on, or years of thoughtful work aimed slightly to the left of the problem.

Clinically I work from cognitive behavioural therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and trauma-informed approaches, bringing formal assessment in when a question about diagnosis or cognition needs a real answer rather than an impression. The population I have ended up specialising in is adults who function extremely well and are quietly paying a large private cost to keep doing so.

Why this site

Because the same three or four conversations keep happening, and they keep happening years later than they needed to. Almost everyone who eventually books an appointment has been circling it for a long time — reading, half-deciding, closing the tab. The thing that finally moved them was rarely an argument. It was usually a sentence, written by someone who clearly knew the specific shape of it, that described their situation more accurately than they had managed to describe it themselves.

So this is a place to put those sentences. It is deliberately small and it will stay small. There is no newsletter, no course, no funnel, no analytics and nothing to buy. If you read something here and never contact anyone, that is a completely successful outcome as far as I am concerned.

Where I practise

I see clients through CEREVITY, a private-pay telehealth practice built for high-stakes professionals — the people for whom the confidentiality question in the third essay is not academic. Private pay is not a luxury position in that context; it is the mechanism by which no claim, code or record enters an insurer’s system.

My full clinical profile — credentials, licensure, specialities and how to book — lives there rather than here, because that is where it belongs and where it is kept current: Christa Smith, PhD, at CEREVITY.

On the links

A handful of paragraphs on this site link out to that practice. I would rather say that plainly at the top than have you work it out. Nothing here is sponsored by anyone else, no link is paid for, and I have no financial relationship with any other site mentioned. The writing came first; the links point at the places where a fuller clinical explanation already exists, so that I do not have to reproduce one badly here.

Colophon

Set in Fraunces, Newsreader and Inter — self-hosted and subset, so your browser never makes a request to anyone but this server. Photography is commissioned editorial work; the people shown are not clients, and the originals are on the plates page. Hand-written HTML and CSS, hosted on Neocities. No cookies, no trackers, no analytics, no third-party requests of any kind. Ten pages, and that is on purpose.