Meet Ana

Ana Ivkovic MD is a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Her clinical interests center on psychiatric disorders in patients with medical illness and the role of nutrition and other lifestyle variables on brain health. She has authored multiple book chapters and articles related to mental health and is the co-author of The Science of Stress (University of Chicago Press, 2016) where she outlines the role of nutrition on brain health and the impact of stress on women’s mental health. She has studied with the Institute for Functional Medicine and the School of Applied Functional Medicine.

As a clinician, Ana has seen firsthand the lifesaving potential of psychiatric medications and fully appreciates medications are frequently an important part of one’s recovery. However, she is also keenly aware of the limitations of this approach, which can far-too-often feel like an uphill battle when key upstream, multifactorial contributors to mood and anxiety symptoms are not addressed.

As a patient herself, Ana has experienced firsthand the limitations of our current medical model, having been told her own profound fatigue and brain fog as a new mom were simply from not resting enough, prompting her to advocate for her own more in-depth but targeted testing; or having seen her patients’ abnormal bloodwork and learning from them that they were told by their doctors that the labs were “nothing to worry about” – a missed opportunity for education and inspiration to make lifestyle changes.