Dr. Kelley O’Donnell is a board-certified psychiatrist and a psychedelic clinician-researcher in New York City.

Her private practice is located in Manhattan, adjacent to Madison Square Park.

Kelley is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where she is the Director of Clinical Training at the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine. She is a lead therapist, co-investigator, and clinical supervisor on a number of trials of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (including psilocybin and MDMA) for a variety of therapeutic applications. Outside NYU, she is a Lead Educator and Clinical Consultant in the Lykos Therapeutics (formerly MAPS-Public Benefit Corporation) MDMA Therapist Education Program, and she is on the faculty of the psychedelic therapist training programs at the Polaris Insight Center and the Integrative Psychiatry Institute.

As an undergraduate, Kelley was in the Great Books program at St. John’s College. After completing post-baccalaureate premedical coursework, she conducted research at the National Institute of Mental Health before earning her MD and PhD (Neuroscience) degrees in the Medical Scientist Training Program at UCLA. Kelley completed her residency in Adult Psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine. In addition to conventional psychiatry training, she completed a Fellowship in Psychoanalysis at both Columbia University and the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY), and became certified as an MDMA therapist (MAPS-PBC), ketamine therapist (KTC), and psychedelic therapist (IPI). She has co-authored over 20 peer-reviewed journal articles, and has received a number of awards for both research and clinical excellence, including the prestigious NIMH Outstanding Resident Award and the ADAA Career Development Leadership Award.

When two circles intersect, as you see in our logo, they form a lens shape known as a “mandorla,” from the Italian word for “almond.” The mandorla represents the union of opposites—of light and shadow, masculine and feminine, heaven and earth. Also known as the “vesica piscis,” this shape has symbolic meaning in depth psychology, medieval iconography, and sacred geometry. 

Many depth psychological and spiritual traditions hold that the roots of suffering lie in the common—but illusory—experience of separation. At Mandorla Wellness, we believe that healing is an experience of wholeness. 

In the highly accessible classic, Owning Your Own Shadow, the late Jungian analyst Robert Johnson writes: 

A particularly powerful form of mandorla can be seen in the customs of South American curanderos, who are a curious mixture of primitive shaman and Catholic priest. Their mesa (table) is an altar where they say Mass for the healing of their patients. They divide this altar into three distinct sections. The right is made up of inspiring elements such as a statue of a saint, a flower, a magic talisman; the left contains very dark and forbidding elements such as weapons, knives, or other instruments of destruction. The space between these two opposing elements is a place of healing. The message is unmistakable; our own healing proceeds from that overlap of what we call good and evil, light and dark. It is not that the light element alone does the healing; the place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise.

This middle place is a mandorla.

At Mandorla Wellness, we honor and support you in your journey from contradiction into paradox, from separation into wholeness.