Siddhartha Shah - Professional Work

Professional Work

Dr. Shah founded and served as the executive director of Psychosocial Assistance Without Borders from 2001 to 2007. In this charitable and service organization, he consolidated strategies to build psychosocial capacity to aid victims of complex emergencies while simultaneously preventing vicarious trauma in the workers themselves. Through his development of ethnomedical competence principles, he also integrated locally available treatments with Western treatments. In parallel to Psychosocial Assistance without Borders, Shah also founded Greenleaf Integrative Strategies in 2002 for his training and education work.

Psychosocial Assistance without Borders operated as a charity, and was funded by donations from individuals. Shah gradually began doing charitable work under the auspices of other organizations. He thus discontinued building Psychosocial Assistance without Borders as a standalone non-profit, favoring to keep it as an intellectual platform.

Dr. Shah was in private practice from 2003-2006 in New York City and 2006-2007 in Washington, DC. In his practice, he implemented an integrative health model that utilized standard medical therapies, psychotherapies, behavioral medicine, medical hypnosis, meditation training, yoga and other Eastern health systems.

In 2005, on a Red Cross grant, he served as a Mind/Body Medicine Practitioner at the Olive Leaf Wholeness Center in New York City, New York. The project involved psychotherapy, mind-body treatments and advanced relaxation techniques for uniformed personnel and first responders (New York Police and Fire Departments and paramedics) with treatment-resistant conditions traced to the 9/11 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center.

Starting in 2008, Dr. Shah devoted his time and efforts full-time on public health training and trauma prevention education through Greenleaf Integrative Strategies. He has appeared on CNN-World and been interviewed on public radio multiple times regarding his efforts.