Every treatment you have already tried — especially the ones that failed — is data about your brain. No failed attempt is wasted: it is all information about your brain biology, guiding your next treatment.
Behavior, mood, and the shape of a life are downstream of the mind — change the mind, and everything downstream changes. MindFirst is built on one principle: measure first, then treat. Proprietary software maps your brain biology. Psychoanalytic depth maps the geometry of your relationship to self and others. Treatment follows the map.
Care in English · Italiano · Español
The Method
Measure first. Then treat.
Most psychiatry treats by trial and error. At MindFirst, treatment begins only after your mind and brain have been mapped — through two instruments that almost never meet in one clinic.
Measurement · Clinical
Affective analysis
Psychotherapy as a measurement instrument: a psychoanalytically trained reading of how your emotions, relationships, and identity are organized. Upon request, sessions are augmented by Noldus FaceReader™ — described by its maker as “the most robust automated system for facial expression analysis” — capturing micro-expression and vocal tonality to sharpen the therapist’s pattern recognition with data no unaided eye can hold.
Measurement · Software
The MindFirst suite
Three proprietary programs — Brain Map, Sleep, Neuropsychology — quantify your neurochemistry, your sleep, and your cognition. Created by our founder. Available only here.
Then
Comprehensive treatment
Medication chosen for a reason, psychotherapy aimed at the structure beneath the symptom, and follow-up that re-measures what treatment changes.
The MindFirst Suite
Software that exists nowhere else.
A collection of proprietary programs created by us and used exclusively at this clinic — built on one insight: the information needed to treat you precisely already exists, in your chart, your ring, your own responses. Nobody has been reading it. This software does — through pharmaco & psychodynamic inferential modeling.
MindFirst Brain Map
Every prescription you’ve taken was an experiment. It already ran.
A conceptually new instrument — the first to read your entire medication history as what it truly is: a series of probes of your brain’s receptor system.
Each past trial — what worked, what didn’t, what you couldn’t tolerate — is matched against a deeply curated pharmacology evidence base to derive a receptor-status map of your brain. The next treatment follows from the map, not from another guess. The failures are the data.
U.S. patent pending. Always interpreted by your psychiatrist.
MindFirst Sleep
Months of sleep, read in depth.
A sleep laboratory shows one night. Your Oura® Ring holds months — timing, architecture, continuity, and how each responds to treatment.
MindFirst Sleep analyzes that record longitudinally, revealing what no single night can: circadian phase shifts, fragmentation patterns, and the true effect of medications on your sleep.
Wearable-based clinical analysis; complements, not replaces, laboratory polysomnography.
MindFirst Neuropsychology
Cognitive testing, from home.
Tasks modeled on the gold-standard tests of formal neuropsychological evaluation — taken on your own, at your own computer, in a quiet room. Every result is scored and interpreted by your physician.
The program speaks, listens, and scores across seven cognitive domains, from processing speed to fluid intelligence. Your data never leaves your device; your report is reviewed with you in session.
A profiling instrument reviewed in consultation — supporting diagnosis and treatment, and formal referral when indicated.
Where Every Treatment Begins
The Foundation Evaluation.
A 90-minute diagnostic consultation. Your full psychiatric, medical, and treatment history is taken — and read, for the first time, as data. We identify which instruments are indicated: Brain Map, Sleep, Neuropsychology, affective analysis — at what depth, in what sequence. You leave with a formulation and a proposed plan. You decide whether to proceed.
Duration90 minutes
FormatIn person — New York or Milan — or telemedicine
OutputA formulation, and a treatment plan built from your map
Treatment
We don’t just measure. We treat.
The measurements exist for one purpose: psychiatric treatment more exact and more complete than either biology or psychology can deliver alone. Medication selected against your receptor profile. Psychotherapy — Transference-Focused Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis — aimed at how your personality is actually organized. Sleep and cognition tracked as treatment proceeds, so progress is measured, not assumed.
“The goal of treatment is not the absence of symptoms. It is a mind returned to itself.”
Clinical Scenarios
Composite cases — not real patients — showing how MindFirst reads situations that ordinary prescribing cannot.
Silvia Bernardi, M.D. trained in medicine in Florence and in psychiatry at Columbia University, where she serves on the faculty. As a neuroscientist, she spent years studying how the brain represents emotion and abstracts knowledge — work published in Cell and PNAS and recognized with the Career Award for Medical Scientists (CAMS) of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund — one of the nation’s premier awards for physician-scientists — alongside the BBRF Young Investigator Award, the Leon Levy Fellowship in Neuroscience, and several federal research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
As a clinician, she is trained in psychopharmacology, Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis — the disciplines that read a person, not just a symptom list. As a builder, she created the MindFirst software suite — instruments of pharmaco & psychodynamic inferential modeling — to bring that scientific rigor into the treatment room.
MindFirst is the synthesis: the only clinic where the psychiatrist who maps your brain, reads your mind, and writes your treatment — and the scientist who built the instruments — are the same person.
Publications
Articles & Essays
Bernardi S. An evolving relationship. ISTFP. 2026. Read →
Bernardi S. Evidence for TFP: an annual review of the current research landscape. ISTFP. 2026. Read →
Bernardi S. The Kernbergian compass: navigating the depths of mature love. ISTFP. 2025. Read →
Bernardi S. AI development — a change in paradigm. ISTFP. 2025. Read →
Bernardi S. Innovations in TFP supervision — focusing on the first three minutes of the session. ISTFP. 2024. Read →
Bernardi S, Benna M, Rigotti M, Munuera J, Fusi S, Salzman CD. The geometry of abstraction in hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Cell. 2020;183(4):954–967.
Bernardi S, Salzman CD. The contribution of nonhuman primate research to the understanding of emotion and cognition and its clinical relevance. PNAS. 2019;116(52):26305–26312.
Cortese S, Faraone SV, Bernardi S, Wang S, Blanco C. Gender differences in adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC). The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 2016;77(4):e421–8.
Okuda M, Picazo J, Olfson M, Hasin DS, Liu SM, Bernardi S, Blanco C. Prevalence and correlates of anger in the community: results from a national survey. CNS Spectrums. 2015;20(2):130–9.
Pallanti S, Bernardi S, Antonini S, Singh N, Hollander E. Ondansetron augmentation in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder who are inadequate responders to serotonin reuptake inhibitors. European Neuropsychopharmacology. 2014;24(3):375–80.
Cortese S, Faraone S, Bernardi S, Wang S, Blanco C. Adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and obesity: epidemiological study. The British Journal of Psychiatry. 2013;203(1):24–34.
Fan J, Bernardi S, Van Dam NT, Anagnostou E, Gu X, Martin L, Park Y, Liu X, Kolevzon A, Soorya L, Grodberg D, Hollander E, Hof PR. Functional deficits of the attentional networks in autism. Brain and Behavior. 2012;2(5):647–60.
Chamorro J, Bernardi S, Potenza MN, Grant JE, Marsh R, Wang S, Blanco C. Impulsivity in the general population: a national study. Journal of Psychiatric Research. 2012;46(8):994–1001.
Bernardi S, Faraone SV, Cortese S, Kerridge BT, Pallanti S, Wang S, Blanco C. The lifetime impact of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC). Psychological Medicine. 2011:1–13.
Bernardi S, Anagnostou E, Shen J, Kolevzon A, Buxbaum JD, Hollander E, Hof PR, Fan J. In vivo 1H-magnetic resonance spectroscopy study of the attentional networks in autism. Brain Research. 2011;1380:198–205.
Bernardi S, Cortese S, Solanto S, Hollander E, Pallanti S. Bipolar disorder and comorbid attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a distinct clinical phenotype? Clinical characteristics and temperamental traits. World Journal of Biological Psychiatry. 2010;11(4):656–66.
Pallanti S, Bernardi S, Allen A, Hollander E. Serotonin function in pathological gambling: blunted growth hormone response to sumatriptan. Journal of Psychopharmacology. 2010;24(12):1802–9.
Bernardi S, Pallanti S. Successful duloxetine treatment of a binge-eating disorder: a case report. Journal of Psychopharmacology. 2010;24(8):1269–72.
Pallanti S, Borgheresi A, Pampaloni I, Giovannelli F, Bernardi S, Cantisani A, Zaccara G, Cincotta M. Motor cortex excitability correlates with novelty seeking in social anxiety: a transcranial magnetic stimulation investigation. Journal of Neurology. 2010;257(8):1362–8.
Pallanti S, Bernardi S, Ramar S, Raglione L, Sorbi S. Complex repetitive behavior: punding after bilateral subthalamic nucleus stimulation. Parkinsonism & Related Disorders. 2010;16(6):376–80.
Pallanti S, Haznedar MM, Hollander E, Licalzi EM, Bernardi S, Newmark R, Buchsbaum MS. Basal ganglia activity in pathological gambling: a fluorodeoxyglucose-positron emission tomography study. Neuropsychobiology. 2010;62(2):132–138.
Pallanti S, Bernardi S, William C, Allen A, DeCaria C, Hollander E. Noradrenergic function in pathological gambling: blunted growth hormone response to clonidine. Journal of Psychopharmacology. 2010;24(6):847–53.
Pallanti S, Bernardi S, Rollo AD, Antonini S, Quercioli L. Unilateral low frequency versus sequential bilateral repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation: is simpler better for treatment of resistant depression? Neuroscience. 2010;167(2):323–8.
Pallanti S, Bernardi S, Antonini A, Singh N, Hollander E. Ondansetron augmentation in treatment-resistant OCD: a preliminary single-blind prospective study. CNS Drugs. 2009;23(12):1047–55.
Bernardi S, Pallanti S. Internet addiction: a descriptive clinical study focusing on comorbidities and dissociative symptoms. Comprehensive Psychiatry. 2009;50(6):510–6.
Pallanti S, Bernardi S. Neurobiology of repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation in the treatment of anxiety: a critical review. International Clinical Psychopharmacology. 2009;24(4):163–73.
Pallanti S, Masetti S, Bernardi S, Innocenti A, Markella M, Hollander E. Obsessive compulsive disorder comorbidity in DBA. Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health. 2008;4:6.
Pallanti S, Bernardi S, Quercioli L. The Shorter PROMIS Questionnaire and the Internet Addiction Scale in the assessment of multiple addictions in a high-school population: prevalence and related disability. CNS Spectrums. 2006;11(12):966–74.
Pallanti S, Bernardi S, Quercioli L, DeCaria C, Hollander E. Serotonin dysfunction in pathological gamblers: increased prolactin response to oral m-CPP versus placebo. CNS Spectrums. 2006;11(12):956–64.
Book Chapters
Bernardi S, Salzman CD. Appetitive and aversive systems in the amygdala. In: Decision Neuroscience / Handbook of Reward and Decision Making, 2nd ed. Dreher JC, Tremblay L, eds. Elsevier, 2016.
Bernardi S, Blanco C. Gambling disorder. In: DSM-5 Casebook: A Learning Companion to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. 2015.
Bernardi S, Blanco C. Treatment of gambling disorder. In: Gabbard’s Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders, 5th ed. American Psychiatric Publishing, 2015.
Okuda M, Bernardi S, Blanco C. The woman who became tired of predicting the future. In: The Addiction Casebook. American Psychiatric Publishing, 2014.
Pallanti S, Bernardi S. Liaison-consultation psychiatry. In: Cassano et al., Disturbi dell’umore. Masson, Milano, 2007.
The trident is the clinic’s mark: three branches of one practice — neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and pharmaco & psychodynamic inferential modeling — held in a single hand.
Daniel Salzman, M.D., Ph.D.
Clinicians
The science of emotion, in the consulting room.
C. Daniel Salzman, M.D., Ph.D. is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, and a tenured full Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Columbia University. His laboratory has spent more than two decades studying how the brain’s emotional circuits — the amygdala and its dialogue with the prefrontal cortex — assign emotional meaning to experience, and how those circuits shape what we perceive, decide, and feel. He is principal investigator of multiple federally funded research programs, and his work appears in the field’s first-tier journals, including Nature, Cell, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and PNAS.
That question — how feeling and cognition are woven together in neural tissue — is the scientific ground on which MIND FIRST stands. He trained in medicine and neuroscience in an M.D.–Ph.D. program at Stanford University and completed his residency in psychiatry at Columbia, where he has remained on the faculty since.
After your consultation, you receive a personal access code for the instrument prescribed to you. Enter it below to begin.
Neuropsychology — Test Battery
Begin your at-home cognitive assessment. Use a computer with Chrome or Edge and a working microphone, in a quiet room, alone — the microphone records everything it hears. You may stop between tasks and resume later with the same code.
Sleep — Data Upload
Share your Oura® Ring export for analysis. Your data is reviewed by Dr. Bernardi and discussed with you in session — it is never analyzed by an unsupervised system.
Access codes are issued only after the Foundation Evaluation. If your code does not work, write to admin@neuroscienceforthemind.com.
Appointments
Begin with a map.
MindFirst is for those who sense, correctly, that something fundamental remains unresolved — and who are ready to address it with the full force of contemporary science. All care, in New York and Milan, begins with the Foundation Evaluation.
New York
122 East 42nd Street, Suite 3200, New York, NY 10168
Office phone
(917) 993-3292
Emailadmin@neuroscienceforthemind.comBilling
Out-of-network practice. A superbill is provided for insurance reimbursement.
Emergency
In a mental health crisis, call 988 (USA) or 112 (Italy).
