Voted Best Psychiatrist in Greenwich. Here's What That Actually Means.

I’ve been voted best psychiatrist in Greenwich. Multiple times. By multiple publications and review platforms. My Google reviews are excellent. My patients say very kind things about me on the internet.

I’m telling you this not because I think it settles anything, but because I think it’s worth being honest about what these things actually measure — and what they don’t.

What Reviews Actually Capture

When a patient writes a five-star review of their psychiatrist, they are almost never saying “This person cured my depression.” They are almost never saying “His treatment protocol was superior to the alternatives.”

What they’re saying is simpler and, I think, more important:

He listened to me. He took me seriously. I felt like a person in his office, not a diagnosis.

Nobody writes a five-star review because their medication dose was perfectly calibrated. They write it because they felt seen. That’s not a small thing. In fact, it might be the whole thing.

— Dr. John S. Tamerin

Read enough psychiatrist reviews — mine or anyone else’s — and a pattern emerges. The language isn’t clinical. It’s relational. “He really gets me.” “I feel comfortable being honest.” “He doesn’t just prescribe — he talks to me.” “He remembers things I told him months ago.”

These are not descriptions of technical excellence. These are descriptions of a relationship.

What Reviews Don’t Capture

Here’s what no review will tell you: whether the therapist challenged the patient when they needed to be challenged. Whether uncomfortable truths were spoken. Whether the therapist had the nerve to say “I think you’re avoiding something” when the patient wanted validation.

Good therapy isn’t always comfortable. The best sessions I’ve had — the ones that led to real change — were often the ones where the patient left feeling unsettled. Not hurt. Not dismissed. But stirred up. Thinking. Wrestling with something they’d been avoiding.

Nobody writes a Yelp review about that. “Five stars — he said something that kept me up all night questioning my entire approach to relationships.” It doesn’t happen. But that’s often where the real work lives.

The Greenwich Problem

Greenwich is a particular kind of place. Wealthy. Educated. High-achieving. The people who live here are used to being the best at what they do. They run companies. They manage portfolios. They solve problems for a living.

And then they walk into my office, and they have to do the one thing their professional lives never require: be vulnerable.

That’s harder than it sounds. Especially in a town where the prevailing culture is performance. Where your neighbor’s lawn is always perfect and nobody talks about their marriage at the cocktail party. Where success is visible and suffering is invisible.

In a town where nobody admits to struggling, walking into a psychiatrist’s office is already an act of courage. I don’t take that lightly.

— Dr. John S. Tamerin

When a Greenwich patient writes a five-star review, there’s something underneath it that most people miss. They’re saying: I found a place where I didn’t have to perform. In a life built on performance, that’s extraordinary.

What I Think “Best” Actually Means

I don’t think “best psychiatrist” means what most people assume it means. It doesn’t mean the most published or the most credentialed or the one with the fanciest office. Those things might correlate with quality. They might not.

What I think it means — what I hope it means, when people say it about me — is this:

He pays attention. He remembers. He doesn’t waste your time. He says what he thinks. He adjusts his approach when it isn’t working. He treats you like an adult. And he’s been doing this long enough to have seen almost everything, so nothing you say is going to shock him.

That last part matters more than people realize. Patients carry around secrets they’ve been terrified to say out loud. When they finally say them, they’re watching for a flinch. They’re scanning for judgment. And when it doesn’t come — when the person across from them simply nods and says “Tell me more” — something in them relaxes. Sometimes for the first time in years.

The Limits of Accolades

I want to be clear about something: awards and reviews are nice, but they’re not why I do this. I didn’t go into psychiatry to collect accolades. I went into it because the human mind fascinates me and because I discovered, early in my career, that I’m good at sitting with people in pain.

That sounds simple. It’s not. Sitting with pain — genuinely sitting with it, not rushing to fix it or explain it away — is a skill that takes decades to develop. It requires a kind of steadiness that no review can measure and no award can confer.

What Matters When You’re Choosing

If you’re looking for a psychiatrist in Greenwich — or anywhere — my advice is this: ignore the accolades and pay attention to how you feel in the room. Do you feel heard? Do you feel safe enough to say the thing you’ve been holding back? Does this person seem genuinely interested in you, or are they watching the clock?

The best therapeutic relationship is the one where you stop performing and start being honest. If a review helps you find that, great. But the review is the map. The relationship is the territory.

I’ve been doing this for fifty-five years. I’ve earned the reviews. But what I really want to earn is your trust. That happens in the room, not on the internet.