Board-Certified Psychiatrist · Manhattan, NYC
I am not the psychiatrist you have seen before.
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Metin Cayiroglu
10+
Years of direct clinical experience with serious psychiatric illness.
4
Fellowships NYMC · SUNY Downstate · USD/Rady · Mount Sinai
6+
Years Zen practice
1000+
Patients treated across NY hospital systems
WHY THIS WORK
The Starting Point
Most psychiatric care is built around a simple transaction. You describe your symptoms. You receive a diagnosis. You are given a prescription. You come back in three months.
I have watched that model fail the most intelligent, capable people I have ever met — not because they were too broken to be helped, but because the model was never designed for them in the first place. The professionals who find their way to this practice are not treatment-resistant. They are model-resistant. They have tried everything the standard system offers. None of it has touched what is actually happening.
This practice exists because something different is needed. Not a better version of what already failed. Something structurally different.
TRAINING
The training
I did not specialize early and stay narrow. I trained across the full spectrum of psychiatric medicine deliberately — because I wanted to understand how the mind breaks down across every context before I decided how to help it recover.
New York Medical College
Doctor of Medicine. Where I learned that the body and the mind are not two separate systems. They are the same system, poorly understood from two different angles.
SUNY Downstate Medical
Center General Adult Psychiatry Residency. Inpatient care, outpatient care, emergency psychiatry, forensic work, early-onset psychosis, substance abuse and addiction. Downstate runs one of the busiest public hospital systems in New York City. Residency here means seeing serious psychiatric illness at full severity — which gives you a calibration that is impossible to get any other way.
University of San Diego
+ Rady Children's Hospital Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship. Inpatient and emergency pediatric psychiatry, eating disorders. This fellowship trained my eye for the developmental origins of the patterns I now treat in adults. The compulsion to perform, the terror of vulnerability, the physical holding patterns — these do not begin in adulthood. They begin long before language.
Mount Sinai Hospital
Consult-Liaison and Psychosomatic Medicine Fellowship. This is where the mind-body duality stops being a philosophical concept and becomes a clinical reality you can measure. Working with oncology patients, transplant evaluations, palliative care — you stop thinking of the body and the psyche as separate departments. The somatic framework I practice today took its final shape here.
The experience
Over ten years of direct clinical work with serious psychiatric illness. Ten years of psychotherapy — individual, couples, and families — using talk therapies and somatic approaches depending on what the situation actually required. Not what the insurance code allowed. Not what the appointment slot permitted.
I have worked with people in acute crisis and people who looked completely fine on the outside. Both taught me the same thing:
the presenting symptom is rarely the real problem. The real problem is almost always structural — biological, developmental, relational. Finding it requires time, depth, and a willingness to question the obvious diagnosis.
That is what this practice is built around.
The Other Framework
For over six years I have been a student-practitioner of Zen Buddhism and Direct Inquiry. I want to be precise about what that means. It does not mean I sit with patients and discuss meditation. It does not mean I believe suffering can be resolved by the right mental posture.
What it means is this: I have spent six years in a formal practice that dismantles the intellectual structures we use to avoid the present reality of experience. Direct Inquiry asks one question repeatedly until the answer stops being a thought and starts being a direct encounter with what is actually happening — in the body, right now.
That is not spirituality. That is the most rigorous somatic method I have encountered. And it is the philosophical backbone of everything I do clinically.
What Happens Next
Three steps. No waiting rooms. No ambiguity.
STEP 01
Request a Consultation
A brief form — not a intake questionnaire. Just enough for me to understand where you are and whether this is the right environment for your work. You will hear back within 48 hours. No gatekeepers, no scheduling team.
STEP 02
The Diagnostic Audit
Two hours. Your full psychiatric, medical, and personal history — rebuilt from the ground up, not summarized from a previous chart. Most people say it is the first time a clinician has actually listened without already deciding what was wrong. That is intentional.
STEP 03
The Architecture Begins
From there we establish a structure built entirely around your situation — the cadence, the depth, the focus. Nothing standardized. Nothing borrowed from a protocol designed for someone else. The progress is real, and unlike a diagnosis, it belongs to you permanently.
Begin
If this sounds like what have you been looking for —
The first step is a conversation. Not a commitment.
Private pay only · Out-of-network · New York & California · Telehealth