Psychiatric Care in Kenai, AK

Integrative, cash-pay telepsychiatry for Kenai — from the comfort of home.

Mental Health Care for Kenai

Kenai and neighbouring Soldotna serve a peninsula whose year is organised around commercial fishing seasons, with work that arrives all at once and then stops.

Willow & Stone brings doctoral-level, integrative psychiatric care to Kenai and the surrounding Kenai Peninsula Borough area by secure telehealth — combining evidence-based medication management with functional, root-cause strategies. You get longer, unhurried appointments and a whole-person approach, without the commute or the waitlist.

Our Services for Kenai

Why Choose Willow & Stone

• ✓Doctoral-level, board-certified psychiatric provider (Dr. Stacey Forbes, DNP, PMHNP-BC)
• ✓Integrative & functional approach — gut-brain axis, nutrition, labs, root causes
• ✓GeneSight pharmacogenomic testing to personalize medication
• ✓Experienced with treatment-resistant depression — root-cause workup, not just the next prescription
• ✓Cash-pay transparency — no insurance delays or prior authorizations
• ✓Telehealth-first convenience for Kenai residents

Kenai in practice

Kenai and neighbouring Soldotna serve the Kenai Peninsula, a borough whose year is organised around commercial fishing and processing seasons. Work arrives all at once — long days, seven-day weeks, physically punishing — and then stops, leaving a long quiet stretch with thin income. Oil and gas operations add a further rotational workforce. That rhythm produces a recognisable pattern: symptoms are endured through the season because stopping is not an option, and people present in the off-season, by which point things have usually been bad for months.

Getting care in Kenai

The peninsula is a substantial drive from Anchorage, along a highway that weather closes and that is genuinely hazardous in winter. Local behavioural health capacity is small for the population it serves and turns over with the seasonal economy, so continuity with one clinician is hard to establish. During the fishing season, an appointment that requires travel is effectively impossible for anyone working it — which is precisely when a short video visit from a boat harbour or a processing plant break room can still happen.

What Kenai patients need from a psychiatric practice

Alaska's daylight swings further across the year than anywhere else in the United States, and that is a clinical fact rather than a scenic one. Seasonal change in mood, sleep, and energy has to be part of the evaluation from the start — not an afterthought once a medication has failed to work through a winter. A practice serving Alaska also has to plan around distance and weather: care that depends on reliably reaching a clinic is care that stops for part of the year.

Shift workers are failed by conventional scheduling more than by anything else. When the clinic is open exactly during working hours, care does not happen — and what looks like disengagement is almost always a roster problem. Appointment times that can move with a rotation are the single most useful thing a practice can offer this population.

Where the nearest psychiatric specialist is an hour or more away, the practical consequence is not slower care but absent care — particularly for the short, frequent follow-ups that medication management depends on. A practice serving this kind of community has to make routine contact cheap in time, or the treatment plan quietly becomes an evaluation and nothing after it.

Appointments in your time zone

Willow & Stone keeps Central Time hours, and Alaska Time runs three hours behind that — so the schedule opens at 7AM and closes at 3PM Alaska time. Confirm your slot in Alaska time when you book so nothing is lost in the conversion.

Transparent Cash-Pay Care

Willow & Stone is a direct-pay practice, so Kenai patients skip insurance delays, prior authorizations, and surprise bills. We provide a superbill you can submit to your insurer for possible out-of-network reimbursement, and we're happy to review current rates with you before you book.

Other Alaska Communities We Serve

Willow & Stone also provides telehealth psychiatry to Anchorage, Wasilla.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you need help right now

Willow & Stone is an outpatient practice and is not an emergency service. If you or someone you care about is in immediate danger, call 911.

For urgent mental health support at any hour, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line. Both are free, confidential, and available 24/7 nationwide.