Tichianaa Armah

Dr. Tichianaa Armah, a Bronx, NY native, graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in psychology and received her Medical Degree from the University of Rochester, the home of the Biopsychosocial model of health care. In her final year of residency at the Yale School of Medicine, she was the American Psychiatric Association Minority Fellow while serving as the chief resident of the Hispanic Clinic at the Community Mental Health Center. Dr. Armah is the Medical Director and Vice President of Behavioral Health at the Community Health Center Inc. She is driven to increase access to quality mental health care for our most vulnerable populations. To achieve these goals Dr. Armah's mission is twofold: community engagement and training the next generation in the mental health field with an integrated approach in primary care settings. Wellness and mental health in all communities has been an important element of her work since the early years of her training. Concern for particularly disadvantaged communities bearing the greater burden of disease, including African Americans and Latino populations, led her to be one of the early organizers of the Yale School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry's Social Justice and Health Equity curriculum. She remains an Assistant Clinical Professor in the department. Beginning in medical school, she facilitated workshops incorporating physical and mental well-being through approaching lifestyle change, with lectures, exercise, and cooking lessons at a local church for the members. She continues to approach her local communities and patients with her fundamental value of overall well-being as key to mental health, believing strongly that medication alone is rarely the solution. She can frequently be found in schools and churches talking about the mental health field to encourage more underrepresented minorities to enter the field. Her most recent efforts also includes increasing access to psychiatry through tele-psychiatry services from experienced mental health professionals.

She was recently honored by the Connecticut Psychiatric Society with the Roger Coleman Memorial Award for her exemplary devotion to patients and commitment to quality care.