Aimee Daramus, PsyD is a clinical psychologist specialising in chronic mental illness, and a lecturer at Harold Washington College in Chicago. She’s currently in private practice, and has a background working in community mental health and inpatient psychiatry.

She’s the author of Understanding Bipolar Disorder: The Essential Family Guide. She also enjoys consulting for filmmakers and writers about how to reduce stigma in media portrayals of mental illness, and has been quoted on mental health topics in several media outlets, including Well+Good.com, Bustle, Mic, and Huffpost.

As a writer, Aimee’s specialty is making complex psychological science relevant and easy to understand, linking that research to practice, and helping to reduce stigma about mental illness. In other words, she’s an epic nerd whose accomplishments include being a popular media expert on the use of video games in therapy, and being able to take absolutely any fandom a client comes up with and use it in session, in creative re-interpretations of established clinical practice.

One of her professional dreams is to own a walk-in closet lined with TV screens for fully immersive VR experiences in her office. Another is to leverage her credentials as a nerd to get a mental health-related panel at comic-cons.

Future writing topics include the use of tech and popular culture in therapy, ways that researchers are trying to solve the inconsistencies with psych meds, following up her first book with more work on helping families build the skills to support loved ones with mental illness, and figuring out how to write the next truly great vampire novel.

As a therapist and teacher, she’s working hard to decolonise her classroom and therapy space and try to convince people that it’s natural to be anxious, burned out or depressed when you’re coping with a global pandemic.

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2021

2020