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Heather Hall, MD

Psychiatrist
Heather Hall MD PC
Elk Grove, California, United States

Dr. Heather Hall is a Sacramento-based psychiatrist with over 30 years of clinical experience specializing in childhood trauma survivors. Her work focuses on trauma, dissociation, psychosis, and the neurobiological systems underlying consciousness and self-experience, with particular interest in the overlap between trauma-related dissociation and symptoms traditionally classified as psychotic disorders.
Her thinking was shaped in part by her work as unit chief on a cultural focus unit at San Francisco General Hospital, which specialized in care for seriously mentally ill patients from severely disadvantaged communities. It was there that she began developing the theory that social defeat, combined with disorganized attachment, produces dissociative coping patterns frequently misdiagnosed as schizophrenia.
Her current work integrates clinical observation with neuroscience, developmental theory, cultural psychiatry, and phenomenology to examine how disruptions in brain networks involved in salience, self-processing, and executive control may underlie dissociation, anomalous self-experience, and psychotic-like phenomena. She is drawn to transdiagnostic models that move beyond rigid categorical diagnosis and better account for developmental context and lived experience.
Dr. Hall is board-certified in general psychiatry, holds a B.A. in biochemistry from Smith College and an M.D. from Drexel University, and completed her training at Pennsylvania Hospital. She served as an associate clinical professor at UC Davis, where she was an award-winning teacher and resident supervisor.
She is an active leader in the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, currently serving as co-chair of the Public Health Committee. She has received the Pierre Janet Writing Award, the President's Award of Distinction, and the Distinguished Achievement Award. She has published in the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation and Trauma, Violence and Abuse.

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