Shaquita Starks, Ph.D., APRN, PMHNP, CNE, FAAN, MSC
Rev. Dr. Shaquita Starks
PhD, APRN, FNP, PMHNP-BC, CNE, FAAN, MSC
I am the founder of Harmony Behavioral & Psychiatric Health, serving clients across Georgia, Tennessee, Maryland, and Washington, DC. I accept insurance for general psychiatric services in Georgia and Maryland and am currently out of network in Tennessee and Washington, DC.
I work with all people, and am especially passionate about high-achieving professionals — in particular, women of color — who have spent years excelling while quietly burning out from the inside. I know this population not only as a clinician, but as one of them.
Services
I offer ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) for adults navigating treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, anxiety, chronic pain, grief, shame, and complex trauma — including all three phases: preparation, the medicine session, and integration. As a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, I can both prescribe and administer ketamine, and can prescribe for clients working with a KAP-trained therapist.
I also offer psychiatric evaluations, medication management, hormone replacement therapy, peptide therapy, weight management, DBT skills training, and evidence-informed supplement guidance for clients who struggle to tolerate conventional medications or want additional support for symptoms like insomnia and anxiety.
My Approach
Every person carries an innate capacity to heal. You are already whole — already the expert on yourself. My role is not to fix you, but to stand beside you as a witness to the strength you cannot yet see, and to create the conditions for healing that is already there.
Ketamine creates a threshold space where the noise quiets, the armor softens, and the person underneath all that striving can finally be seen — first by themselves. I am particularly passionate about guiding people through shame and guilt, and supporting them in building lives oriented around purpose, love, and self-compassion. For women of color, who are so often rewarded for their endurance and so rarely given permission to rest or need — this work is not just therapeutic. It is revolutionary.
PRATI’s purpose — Reconnecting to the Sacred: Self, Community, Nature, and Spirit — is not a framework I have adopted. It is a description of how I have always understood healing.
I grew up in a small community in Mississippi. This orientation toward the sacred is not something I learned in a classroom — it is part of my being. Community carried me through my deepest challenges, and I create it wherever I land. I encourage my clients to do the same, because we were never meant to heal alone.
My clinical work begins with the belief that every person is already whole. Beneath the armor of achievement, survival, shame, and grief, the sacred self remains intact and waiting. Ketamine-assisted therapy, in my practice, is a doorway — a held space where clients can put down the weight of the external world and return to themselves. The medicine quiets the noise. The therapeutic container makes the reunion safe. The integration work makes it last.
Community is central to how I practice. I have committed to reserve scholarship spots each quarter for clients who cannot afford full-fee KAP, because reconnection to the sacred is not a luxury. I am particularly called to serve Black women and women of color — a community taught to perform strength at the expense of their own wholeness, and chronically underrepresented in psychedelic-assisted care. Bringing this work to that community is, for me, an act of both healing and justice.
Nature and spirit live in my practice through the recognition that we are not separate from something larger than ourselves and that psychedelic medicine makes that truth undeniable. My role is to help clients carry that knowing back into their lives and build something shaped by it.
I hold a PhD in Nursing Science, nearly three decades of nursing experience, and a Fellowship in the American Academy of Nursing. I am also an ordained Minister of Spiritual Consciousness through Inner Visions Spiritual Sanctuary, trained in universal spiritual laws, pastoral care, metaphysical study, and sacred ceremonies and rituals across diverse faith traditions. My clinical training and spiritual formation are not separate tracks; together, they shape a practice that honors the whole person: the biology, the psychology, the story, the metaphysical, and the spirit.