What I Study
My research begins from the same question that guides my clinical work. How is suffering recognized, interpreted, supported, and transformed - in a person’s body and mind, within relationships and culture, and inside a healthcare system? The six areas below are not separate interests. They are the places where this one question takes on different faces: in a life lived without recognition, in a community after disaster, in a body after childbirth, and in the wider currents of how people put their own suffering into words. Across all of them, I am following the same question.
Women's ADHD and Lived Experience
This is where the question is at its sharpest. I study the masking and delayed diagnosis of ADHD in women, the role conflicts it produces, and the experience of coming to understand oneself late. Moving between text-mining of online-community writing, in-depth qualitative work, and scoping reviews, I try to hear both the large patterns and the single story. The studies published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods (2025) and in the Journal of Attention Disorders (in press) grew out of this work.
Disaster Mental Health and Korean Medicine in Public Health
This is the public layer of the same question - what happens to suffering when it becomes collective and institutional. I have developed and evaluated a Korean Medicine care manual and training program for the mental health of disaster survivors, and from July 2026 I lead a study asking how Korean Medicine resources have been used within the public healthcare system's disaster response, and how that system might be improved. Disaster, for me, is not a policy abstraction but the place where a system of care is tested.
Trauma and Mind-Body Psychotherapy
This is research into how suffering lives in the body, and how recovery can move through it. I study how somatic approaches - including Brainspotting, M&L, and Hakomi - can serve work with trauma, somatization, and autonomic regulation, from the standpoint of clinical application and of training. The evaluation of newer modes of delivery, such as VR-based Korean Medicine psychotherapy, belongs here as well.
Women's Health and Postpartum Care
This is research into how women's suffering shows itself, and finds support, during a time of profound bodily change. I study the lived experience of postpartum recovery and the effects of Korean Medicine-based postpartum care, alongside qualitative work on postpartum depression and mothers' experiences of childbirth, and the development and evaluation of public-hospital postpartum programs.
Integrative and Collaborative Care
This is research into how different systems of medicine can work together in front of one person's suffering. Through studies of neurocognitive disorders and dementia, public-hospital clinical pathways, and clinician and patient perceptions of collaboration, I explore the conditions under which Korean and conventional medicine can genuinely work side by side.
AI, Text-Mining, and Digital Mental Health
Text-mining and AI are, for me, at once a tool, a way of listening, and a question. A tool for finding what clinical practice should learn from the ways people describe their own suffering; a way of hearing voices the consulting room may miss; and a question about what it takes for mental-health technology to be clinically safe, humane, and culturally attuned. I believe AI should support clinical understanding and care rather than replace the clinician, and I am interested in translating that belief into the language of testable research.