Psychiatric Services

CARES is proud to announce the addition of Psychiatric services to the services currently offered. This will bring medical expertise and medication management to the wide array of diagnostic and behavioral treatments currently offered.

Dr. Lisa Ponfick, MD, has been providing Psychiatric Care since 2000. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Colorado. She completed a 4-year Psychiatry Residency at the Medical University of South Carolina, then a 2 year subspecialty Fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at University of California San Diego. She was selected as Chief Resident for both of these levels of training. Since finishing training she has worked in outpatient and residential settings with children, adolescents, and adults with a wide variety of diagnoses. She has additional experience with children, adolescents and adults who have disruptive behaviors and multiple diagnoses. She is dedicated to ongoing learning and evidence-based treatments, and she serves as Voluntary Clinical Faculty to Psychiatry trainees at the University of California San Diego. Currently she works with children with severe behavior issues in a residential treatment setting, in addition to seeing children and adults with a variety of issues as outpatients.

Also, she has been very active in the field of Psychiatry on the national level. She has volunteered on the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Health Care Access and Economics Committee for the last 8 years, working to provide accessibility and funding of high-quality mental health services for youth.

She will be providing medication management and therapy services to CARES clients with Autism Spectrum Disorders, with the added capability of seeing other family members and other disorders such as issues with mood, anxiety, sleep, and attention. She also has the capability to provide a variety of consultations on medical issues and medications, and she prefers to have close communication with other treatment providers. At CARES, she will attend multi-disciplinary treatment team meetings to provide medical expertise to CARES staff in addition to directly providing care to individual patients. She feels it is important to provide patients and their families with the educational tools to make informed decisions, and to collaborate on a treatment plan.