There is a particular quality to the way Erin Herzog speaks about her patients, a steadiness that suggests both deep conviction and hard-won wisdom. When she talks about unconditional positive regard, the phrase doesn't sound like therapeutic jargon but rather like a description of something she has actually managed to achieve, through years of practice and an almost stubborn refusal to look away from suffering. She works in New York City now, serving the LGBTQ community as a mental health professional, but the origins of her vocation reach back to a childhood spent watching her parents tend to the sick and the struggling.
Her mother was a nurse, her father an occupational therapist. The dinner table conversations in the Herzog household revolved around bodies and minds, around the intricate machinery of healing. Most children growing up in such an environment might develop either a passionate attraction to medicine or an equally passionate aversion to it. Herzog found herself drawn in, but not in the way one might expect. It wasn't the intensity of emergency rooms or the precision of surgical interventions that captivated her. It was something quieter, more intimate.
In middle school, she walked into a therapy room for the first time. What she discovered there was not so much a revelation as a recognition. Here was a space where emotions could be expressed without judgment, where the complicated business of being human could be examined without shame. The room itself became an answer to a question she hadn't yet learned to ask: How does one help people not just survive, but actually thrive?
The insight arrived early and stuck. By the time Herzog reached college, she had already mapped out the contours of her future. She chose social work for what she calls its flexibility, though that word doesn't quite capture what she means. What she wanted was a discipline capacious enough to hold her various interests, integrated health and case management, chronic wellness and mental health, the whole constellation of factors that determine whether someone thrives or merely endures. A social work degree offered not just career options but a philosophy: the understanding that health is never merely physical, that a person's wellbeing is inseparable from their circumstances, their relationships, their place in the world.
Her undergraduate program understood this too. They sent students into the field early, freshman year, an approach that might seem premature but that Herzog now sees as essential. She found herself working in hospice and cancer care, accompanying people through the final chapters of their lives. The work was difficult in ways she hadn't anticipated. It required a particular kind of courage to sit with people who were dying, to be present for their fear and grief without trying to fix or minimize it. But it also clarified something for her. She wanted to work in outpatient settings, in environments where different disciplines collaborated, where care extended beyond the immediate crisis to encompass the long, difficult work of living.
What Herzog learned in those early placements was as much about herself as about her patients. She discovered, for instance, that she did not want to work in acute care settings, that the frenetic pace and constant emergency did not suit her temperament. This might sound like a negative realization, but Herzog doesn't treat it that way. "Learning what you don't like is as important as learning what you're passionate about," she says, and there is a pragmatism in the statement that feels characteristic. She understands that one's calling rarely arrives fully formed, that few people simply know from the beginning exactly where they belong. Instead, she advocates for exploration, for interviewing professionals and trying different kinds of community work, for the gradual accumulation of experience that eventually reveals a pattern.
Her advice to students carries the weight of someone who has actually walked the path she's describing. Pick a degree that allows for flexibility, she tells them. Get involved in community work as soon as you can. The guidance is practical, almost prosaic, but underneath it runs a deeper current of belief: that meaningful work is found through engagement, through showing up and paying attention, through the patient work of learning who you are and what you can offer.
Now, working with the LGBTQ community in New York City, Herzog has found her particular corner of the healthcare world. It is work that requires not just clinical skill but also a deep understanding of marginalization and resilience, of the specific ways that discrimination and stigma shape mental health. When she talks about advocating for her patients' healthcare rights, you sense that she means something quite concrete, that she has stood in hospital corridors and insurance offices, that she has made phone calls and written letters, that advocacy for her is not an abstract principle but a daily practice.
She has a vision for the future of healthcare that is both ambitious and grounded. She wants to see improvements in integrated care, the kind of collaboration between mental and physical health providers that still remains frustratingly rare. She wants to see healthcare costs decrease, the burden on individuals lightened. Most fundamentally, she wants to see what she describes as the restoration and healing of injustice and corruption within large healthcare systems, a phrase that acknowledges both the deep problems and the possibility of repair.
The path to these changes, she believes, runs through conversation and accountability. It's a modest-sounding prescription, quietly practical. But there is something radical in it too, the insistence that transformation happens not through grand gestures but through the accumulated effect of many people refusing to accept what is broken, insisting instead on what could be.
In this, Herzog seems entirely consistent with the young person who first walked into that therapy room in middle school and recognized it as a safe space. She has spent her career trying to create more such spaces, to come alongside people, as she puts it, in their struggle for health and dignity. Her approach is grounded and genuine, marked by the steady application of skill and attention, the belief that everyone deserves unconditional positive regard, and the quiet insistence that healthcare is not a privilege but a right.
It's the kind of work that rarely makes headlines, that accumulates its victories in individual lives rather than sweeping reforms. But it is also the kind of work that holds the whole edifice of healthcare together, that makes the system, for all its flaws, capable of actually healing. Herzog seems to understand this perfectly. She has chosen her corner and she tends it well, with a combination of idealism and pragmatism that suggests she will be doing this work for a very long time.
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