Lisa M. Sussman, PSYD

Lisa Sussman, Psy.D. is a clinical psychologist licensed in NJ and the new Director of Health Psychology for the Southern Region of the Hackensack Meridian Medical group. Her primary practice location is at a JSUMC satellite office where she supports the neuroscience and integrative health & medicine programs. She has 30 years of experience working in outpatient and inpatient medical, integrative, rehabilitation, and behavioral health teams and settings such as a burn unit, spinal cord, cardiac, and traumatic brain injury rehabilitation, a musculoskeletal clinic, and hospital-based behavioral and multi-disciplinary integrative health centers.

Dr. Sussman earned her doctorate and masters degrees at Florida Tech and completed her internship and post-doctoral training at the East Orange VA and Bacharach Institute for Rehabilitation, respectively. She is certified in Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), which combines using acupressure from Eastern Medicine with traditional psychology interventions. She has also trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), Nutritional & Integrative Medicine for Mental Health Professionals, and Polyvagal theory.

In 2005, Dr. Sussman joined Meridian Health in their hospital-based outpatient behavioral health center, where she met individually with adult clients, facilitated groups for people coping with chronic pain and medical conditions & anxiety management skills, and supervised psychology doctoral interns and psychiatry residents. She transitioned to the then new Hackensack Meridian Health Integrative Health & Medicine program in 2016, spending 9.5 years providing outpatient clinical health psychology services for patients navigating physical and mental health challenges and providing integrative mental health training to medical students and residents. She is an Assistant Professor in the Dept of Psychiatry & Behavioral Health, Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine.

Dr. Sussman hopes to draw from her years of experiences across settings to build a robust clinical health psychology service line to meet the needs of the southern region Hackensack Meridian Neuroscience Institute neurology teams and their patients. Her passion is to help adults of all ages connect with their inner wisdom and outer resources and to learn skills to take great care of themselves, optimizing quality of life and adjustment in body, mind, community, and spirit. She works with her patients on a short-term basis which is patient centered, collaborative, culturally sensitive, and trauma-informed. She incorporates and draws from several modalities, depending on her patient’s needs, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia, mindfulness, positive psychology, EFT, MI, narrative and supportive therapy, non-pharmacological pain-management, grief work, and other cognitive-somatic interventions.