Ask the Therapist is staffed by our well-qualified, licensed therapists who spend time every week reviewing the dozens of questions that come in and choosing ones that are appropriate to answer in a public venue.
Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D.
Dr. Marie Hartwell-Walker is licensed in Massachusetts as both a psychologist and marriage and family therapist and has been in practice for over 30 years. She has authored advice columns for parents, articles and books on classroom discipline for teachers, and various programs for human service agencies and industry. Grounded in Adlerian psychology, her focus is on helping people take more responsibility for themselves and get along better with others. Dr. Marie has been married for almost 40 years and is the mother of 4. For more examples of her advice to parents and couples, see www.parentadvisor.net.
Kristina Randle, Ph.D., LCSW
Kristina Randle, Ph.D., LCSW is a licensed psychotherapist with extensive experience in the field of mental health. She works with adults, adolescents, children and families in both individual and group counseling settings. Her background includes Community Mental Health and University Counseling settings. Kristina is also involved in university-based mental health research and has published a number of papers in her field. She is particularly interested in matters relating to Schizophrenia and other severe mental illness. In her practice, Kristina utilizes a Humanistic-Existential framework.
Diana L. Walcutt, Ph.D.
Dr. Diana Walcutt has been practicing for over 20 years, working with anxious and depressed patients. She began her career with terminally ill cancer patients while still in The Johns Hopkins University’s undergraduate school, studying neuroscience and counseling. After graduating Magna Cum Laude from Hopkins, she went on to take a dual doctorate in psychology and theology from the Rosemead School of Psychology in Southern California.
There she learned to work with difficult and universal spiritual questions with which people often struggle, whether the patient is Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Agnostic or Atheist. Tough questions that include; “Who am I?” Am I loveable? Are my needs going to be met? Am I safe? and, Why am I here?” have been a focus of many patient’s issues in therapy.
While at Hopkins, she worked in basic research at the School of Medicine for nearly 24 years, and has integrated her deep love and understanding for medicine with her passion for psychology.
She continued in the specialized study of the brain and how it functions and, while a student in graduate school was asked to co-teach classes in psychopharmacology, psychophysiology and neuroscience. It was in California that Dr. Walcutt discovered the amazing tool of neurofeedback. She has been using it successfully for 14 years with patients who are faced with a wide array of issues that include attention deficit, learning and processing problems, depression, anxiety, PTSD, Autistic Spectrum Disorders, migraine headaches, seizure disorders, traumatic brain injuries and sleep disorders. Her dissertation was on the efficacy of neurofeedback in migraines.
She and her colleague, Dr. Jennifer Fee co-founded The Stress Masters and have created, recorded and produced CDs for mastering stress and anxiety. Titles include “Stress Less!” and, “Be Still (a CD that includes Scriptures from the Bible) and a four CD set entitled “Stress Less! on Horseback.” The profits from this most recent CD are donated to support a horse rescue program in Pennsylvania.
Dr. Walcutt continues to see psychotherapy patients in Baltimore Maryland, and works with mood disorders, relationship issues, Worker’s Comp patients and using hypnosis, biofeedback and neurofeedback where applicable.
She is an accomplished artist, having won national recognition and awards for her work and was also a medical illustrator at Hopkins, with many hundreds of pieces published. She also was an amateur photographer and included in her portfolio portraits of animals, scenery, and medical items. Finally, as a side note, her first true love is horses. She began riding at the age of two and hopes that she will ride until she’s 100. She has ridden and shown in Hunter Jumper shows, Sidesaddle and Three Day Eventing.
