Founders and technology professionals.
You should not have to spend the first three sessions explaining what a board meeting is, why a runway number is keeping you awake, or what it costs to be the person everyone else's livelihood depends on.
Context that does not need explaining
People in this work often come in with some version of:
- Burnout that reads as cynicism, detachment, or a flat inability to care about work that used to matter.
- Decision fatigue: the specific depletion of making consequential calls all day on incomplete information.
- Sleep that has quietly become the first thing sacrificed, and has stayed that way for years.
- Anxiety tied to funding cycles, runway, performance reviews, or a looming layoff.
- Suspected ADHD, often surfaced after years of compensating with raw effort and long hours.
- The isolation of high accountability: everyone reports to you, or depends on you, and there is no one to be uncertain in front of.
- Identity fused to output, so that a bad quarter registers as a verdict on your worth as a person.
Neither optimization nor pathology.
The goal is not to make you a more efficient machine, and it is not to treat ambition as a symptom. It is to work out what is actually happening and what would genuinely help.
Diagnose carefully
Burnout, depression, anxiety, ADHD, and chronic sleep deprivation produce overlapping symptoms and call for different treatment. Sorting them out properly is the first piece of work, using history and standardized measures rather than pattern-matching.
Move towards values
Reconnect with what feels important, what drives you to work hard, what sparks your passion and interest, so that the work feels sustainable and joyful again.
Look underneath
Dr. Yu's psychodynamic and psychoanalytic training means the work can go past coping strategies to what is actually driving the pace, often something older than the current job, and older than the career. That is usually where durable change comes from, rather than from a better system.
Practical shape of the work.
Treatment may include medication, psychotherapy, or both. Dr. Yu believes psychotherapy is a vital part of mental health treatment and recommends that all of her patients receive some form of it. If you already have a therapist, she can provide medication management while collaborating with them.
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for depression and anxiety.
- CBT for Insomnia (CBT-I): the first-line treatment for chronic sleep problems, and often the highest-yield intervention available.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), particularly where the work is about values and tolerating uncertainty.
- Psychodynamic psychotherapy for the patterns that keep reappearing across roles and companies.
- Medication management, monitored with standardized measures so decisions rest on data rather than impression.
- Executive function support where ADHD is part of the picture.
Scheduling and confidentiality
Telehealth is available anywhere in California, which makes consistent care realistic through travel and unpredictable weeks. As an out-of-network practice, no insurance company receives your diagnosis or treatment records unless you choose to submit claims yourself.
Currently accepting new patients.
In person in Noe Valley, or by telehealth anywhere in California.