About

Erica Cao is a psychiatry resident at San Mateo County Psychiatry Residency Program.

Trained in psychology and ethnomusicology, she spent the past few years conducting fieldwork and organizing songwriting workshops with social service organizations in NYC. Now in the SF Bay Area, she continues this work in community mental health settings. She co-founded Humans in Harmony, a 501(c)(3) arts nonprofit which organizes collaborative arts projects with community members. She was a contributor for Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal and other writings have appeared at Journal of Medical Humanities and Hippocampus Magazine. Her interests are in critical theory, performance studies, and psychoanalysis.

She is working on ethnographic projects on music in community psychiatry and on institutional psychotherapy.

Her psychotherapy approach is evolving with a focus on psychoanalysis through a psychosocial perspective for the twenty-first century (e.g., taking after Bion, Winnicott, Lacan, Fanon, Tosquelles).

She completed her MD at Columbia University. Before this, she received a doctorate in Music from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Psychology and Certificate in Music Performance from Princeton University.

ecao@smcgov.org