Robert Brecher, Psy.D.

The stress of living with a medical condition often requires patients to balance lifestyle changes with conflicting personal expectations and demands. These conflicts create stress and often contribute to feelings of anger, demoralization, guilt, and worry.

For many chronic medical conditions, stress creates a vicious cycle: difficult, challenging, and problematic symptoms lead to stress, stress leads to greater difficulty balancing management or prevention of symptoms, in turn making symptoms more frequent, severe, and making the management of symptoms even more difficult and stressful.

Through promotion of healthy response to symptoms and stress management, patients can achieve reduced emotional distress accompanying changes in life circumstances because of chronic medical conditions which in turn contributes to reduced symptom frequency, severity, and disease progression.

Patients I work with can expect treatment to remain tailored to individual circumstances and adapt to the shifting needs often encountered over time when living with chronic medical illnesses.

Using the evidenced-based methods of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, and Patient-Centered philosophy I aim to reinforce each patient’s resilience and help break the vicious cycle between stress and chronic medical condition progression, and, improve quality and satisfaction of life. Additionally, patients can experience restoration of self-worth through alignment of healthy lifestyle change with one’s own values.

Credentials

• Licensed Psychologist New Jersey
• Licensed Psychologist Pennsylvania
• Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (Psy.D.) – Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine
• Masters of Science in Clinical Psychology (M.S.) – Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine
• Masters of Science in Clinical Counseling and Health Psychology (M.S.) – Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine