About Me
Dr. Nina E. Cerfolio, MD FAPA
Clinical Assistant Professor Department of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai Hospital
Dr. Cerfolio is a Castle Connolly Top Doctor and an Assistant Clinical Professor of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. She is a board-certified psychiatrist with a private practice in Manhattan. As Associate Attending in the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, she teaches residents psychotherapy and psychiatry.
Nina Cerfolio MD, Assistant Clinical Professor of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is an internationally recognized expert on trauma, mass shootings and terrorism and a board certified, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in New York City. In practice for 30+ years, Nina’s success rests in her unique approach, which integrates traditional psychiatric training with her decades of spiritual training. She has been published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals, and presented her original work on the psychological influences of spirituality, trauma and terrorism nationally and internationally, and featured on numerous TV outlets. Her thought-provoking new book, Psychoanalytic and Spiritual Perspectives on Terrorism: Desire for Destruction (Routledge, Dec, 2023), weaves her team’s cutting edge research with her extraordinary first-hand experiences of being a first responder and unique real-world trajectory to explore a more expansive understanding of the origins of terrorism while highlighting an overlooked spiritual lens as a powerful antidote for healing from trauma.
After completing a two-year fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer in Consultation / Liaison Psychiatry, where she received a grant from the American Cancer Society, Dr. Cerfolio was an Attending Consultation / Liaison Psychiatrist at NYU Medical Center. She was also a Human Sexuality Fellow at Weill Cornell Medical Center. After graduating from St. Vincent’s Hospital and Medical Center psychiatry residency, Dr. Cerfolio returned to St. Vincent’s Hospital as Chief of the Psychiatric Emergency Room and Walk-in Clinic. While in academic medicine, Dr. Cerfolio taught and supervised residents and medical students to psychiatrically evaluate patients who were hospitalized for surgical and medical reasons and manage psychiatric emergencies. Completing her psychoanalytic training at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, Dr. Cerfolio is currently in solo private practice.
In recognition of Dr. Cerfolio’s professional excellence throughout the years, she has been honored with awards, including winning the Journal Prize for best paper published in Psychodynamic Psychiatry in the last two years,
2022-2023, Leading Physicians of the World, America’s Top Psychiatrist, and Top Psychiatrists in New York. She has been recognized with numerous Patients Choice Awards and America’s Most Compassionate Doctors. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and Fellow of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine.
She has served on numerous boards, including The Tristate Community Advisory Board of Education Broadcasting Channel Thirteen/WNET since 2003. She has served on the board of the Ethics Committee of NYU Downtown Hospital from 2005 to 2013 and St Paul's Center of New York from 2007-2009. From 2004 to 2009, she served on the Board of Advisors of the Achilles Track Club.
Dr. Cerfolio remains active in the American Psychiatric Association (APA). She was Chair of the Committee of Women of the New York County District Branch of the APA from 2000 to 2004 and member of the Executive Council of New York County District Branch of the APA from 2000 to 2006.
She has published in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Detroit News, numerous peer-reviewed journals, and presented her work nationally and internationally. Some of her appearances on television include Inside Editi0n, Channel Thirteen / WNET, WNBC NEWS, NBC, ABC, Fox News and CBS.
She is an avid sportswoman, who enjoys ultra-marathon running and tennis and revels in extreme skiing. Nina was mid-western state champion in singles and played first singles and was on the Varsity tennis team for four years. After college, Nina also played on the women's qualifying tennis circuit. As an elite endurance athlete, she won the Half Marathon on the Great Wall of China in 2004, and placed second overall for women in the Kurt Steiner 50K Ultra Marathon in 2003. She has completed two Ironman triathlons.
My Mission
My lifelong dedication is helping others evolve spiritually along the path of greater self-awareness and actualization. To see not only the forest for the trees, but beyond the trees. Consciousness is a vast multidimensional existence, where identity is more than how we define ourselves professionally and in our daily lives, but also as a spiritual being.
My passion is helping my patients, who are interested, in connecting with a spiritual understanding of their psychological experience, which is mostly unconscious. By embracing each person as a whole, rather than from a “deficit model”, psychotherapy deepens from working with concrete, materialistic issues to healing their souls. Mindfulness practices including meditation and other practices are utilized to make more intrapsychic space for understanding one’s emotions in order to have the ability to make different life choices and transform suffering. I find an integrated holistic approach to be complementary, and comprehensive.
