Meet Dr. Daugherty

I trained as a psychiatrist. But that's not all.

A note from someone who needed more than their profession — and what I found on the other side.

The setup

I trained as a doctor at nineteen. Five years of medicine. Five years of psychiatry. Sub-specialties in child, adolescent, and forensic work. By the time I was in my early thirties, I was living what looked, from the outside, like a complete success. A senior US psychiatrist offered to help me retrain in California — a path that would likely have led to a $1–2 million annual salary. I said no. Not because I didn’t want the money. Because I knew I’d be playing someone else’s game for the rest of my life.

12+

Working as a as psychiatrist

2021

Founded Pandion Health

for Community Impact

Psychiatric Subspecialties

Healing is my journey

The real education

The thing I never tell people on first meeting is that I’d had psoriasis since I was nine years old. The year my parents split up. I tried steroids, methotrexate, sun, diet: everything mainstream medicine offered. It would clear, then return. When I started psychiatry training, I did my own psychotherapy, partly out of clinical interest, partly because I was tired of carrying something I couldn’t name. Within six months of beginning psychoanalytic therapy, the psoriasis cleared. It’s been fourteen years. The skin condition that no medication had touched dissolved when I found a place where I could finally tell the truth. That experience changed how I see medicine.

“The skin condition that no medication had touched dissolved when I found a place where I could finally tell the truth.”

The long recalibration

Before psychiatry, I left acute care medicine because counting heartbeats wasn’t enough. I worked with refugees on Christmas Island and learned what trauma does to the body - pain that doesn’t follow anatomy. I trained in forensic psychiatry in California. I built a career on the intersection of disciplines other people kept separate. And alongside all of it, I was rebuilding the parts of myself that medical training had quietly required me to put away. Music. Sport. Friendship. The right to be a whole person, not just a credential. It took thirteen years of psychotherapy. Plant medicine retreats. A move to Bali. A marathon. A men’s group I now organise. Years of building Pandion Health into a 25-clinician practice. A lot of trial and a lot of error. What I found on the other side of all of it was simple: a life that’s mine.

What I do now

I still see patients. I still run Pandion. I still write and play music and train in padel and live in Bali with a partner I love. And I work privately with a small number of accomplished people who are where I was at thirty-two. Successful on paper. Quietly disquieted. Aware that something fundamental needs to change but unsure what, or how, or whether they’re allowed. If that’s you, I’d like to meet.