Aaron Krasner
Dr. Krasner joined Teach for America in 1997 as a bilingual educator prior to studying medicine. After securing a multiple subjects credential and logging five years of classroom teaching experience, he transitioned to medicine because he wanted to develop himself as a resource to young people and families. He completed his MD at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine prior to completing internship, residency, fellowship, and a post-doctoral fellowship in developmental neuropsychiatry at Columbia University. Thereafter he became the Medical Director for the Adolescent Transitional Living Program at Silver Hill Hospital prior to committing himself to the private practice of child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry in Wilton CT. Dr. Krasner has trained in and published original research on psychiatric genetics, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology, earning the title of Assistant Professor in the department of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.
Dr. Krasner’s theoretical orientation is developmental, psychodynamic, and pragmatic. He views children and adults as traversing a developmental trajectory in which context, history, and biology codetermine subjective reality. His work is guided practically by intersubjective psychoanalytic theory in which nonjudgemental joining and emotional availability power the development of rapport and ultimately psychic growth. Dr. Krasner helps his patients by any means necessary including individual and family therapy, pharmacotherapy, consultations with experts, and collaborations with higher levels of care when indicated. Dr. Krasner defines clinical success as the progressive capacity for patients to accept themselves and the antecedents to their troubles while working towards the amelioration of problems in establishing a life worth living. He works with patients toward this goal by enhancing motivation to prioritize and valorize treatment as a compassionate practice capable of disrupting psychopathology and sustaining its gradual remission.
Dr. Krasner and Tracey Masella founded the Krasner Adolescent Institute in the Fall of 2022. The Institute is solely focused on outpatient assessments of complex teens and families that have not met with treatment success. Throughout the course of their ten-year collaboration, Krasner and Masella have noted substantive limitations in conventional assessments - mostly the absence of integration. They have convened a team of experts who share their clinical concerns with assessment as usual and have committed time, energy, and effort to a collaborative assessment procedure in which typically siloed practitioners assemble twice weekly to share in and develop a robust, biopsychosocial understanding of the individual child, parents, and the family system. While this interdisciplinary model is hardly novel, the application to contemporary child and adolescent psychiatry outpatient practice certainly is.
Dr. Krasner is preoccupied with transforming psychiatric and psychological assessment from a perfunctory, marginally relevant task into a dynamic process that yields superior results capable of powering treatment planning and treatment plan implementation for teens and families most deserving of relief, emotional growth, and stability.