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I’m Lillian Ingram. I own Learning to Achieve Wellness. I started the office primarily to be able to offer people a whole array of mental health services. I want each of my patients to be able to be as content and happy with their life and ability to do their activities of daily living at the lowest effective dose of medication.

So I like to introduce GeneSight to my patients by kind of going over first a medication history and let the patient know that there is a test. Very simple, non invasive. It’s a cheek swab. We’ll have the results in about two to five days, and it’ll be like a roadmap for prescribing.

I do always tell everybody though, it is a roadmap. We need to look at what’s going on overall. So are we treating depression? Are we treating bipolar?

Are we treating schizophrenia? I use GeneSight to be able to help determine what medication I would like to be able to choose. I think GeneSight does much more than tells you just how you metabolize medications. So it’s going to tell us about our genetic pathways.

So we know from STAR*D trial, from other trials, that the more medicines that we start trying, the more risk the patient has of not having that medication be effective. So if we can be able to determine what medications could be effective upfront, put that in combination with a very good diagnostic interview and actual diagnosis of the patient, match the two together. Hopefully we can have success within the first one to two medications. It’s so rewarding as a clinician because we always want to do the right thing for our patients.

The GeneSight test has helped me in my practice to give science based answers to our patients about their medications and achieve their remission or reduction in their mental health symptoms.