About MMHC

Meet the Founders

Manhattan Mental Health Counseling was founded in 2014 to solve a specific problem: New Yorkers struggled to find competent psychotherapists who also accepted their health insurance.

Natalie Buchwald, LMHC-D, built the practice and remains its Founding Clinical Chair. Steven Buchwald leads Authenticity, which supports MMHC with technology and practice operations. Today MMHC is a team of 100+ clinicians, including supervised clinicians, offering in-network therapy across New York State.

Natalie Buchwald, founder of Manhattan Mental Health Counseling

Natalie Buchwald, LMHC-D

Founder and Founding Clinical Chair

Portrait of Steven Buchwald

Steven Buchwald

CEO, Authenticity

Founder

Natalie Buchwald, LMHC-D

Founder and Founding Clinical Chair

Licensed Mental Health Counselor, New York

LMHC-D #D4643

Portrait of Natalie Buchwald, LMHC-D

I founded Manhattan Mental Health Counseling around a simple belief: you should be able to use your insurance and still feel like you’ve found an exceptional therapist. That was the idea then, and it still is.

I trained in mental health counseling at Brooklyn College, and I’ve spent much of my career exploring what actually helps people change. My training has taken me from psychoanalytic work at the Karen Horney Institute, to two years specializing in eating disorders at the Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, to another two years studying Hakomi, a somatic therapy. My broader interests include intimacy, embodiment, and how people relate to one another.

I’m fascinated by the places where psychology, the body, relationships, and human potential meet. Increasingly, I’m also interested in how technology can help us make meaningful change more accessible.

A good therapist helps you see what you can’t quite see from inside your own life: the patterns you repeat, the ways you protect yourself, and the possibilities you haven’t yet imagined.

Ultimately, I want people not just to feel better, but to feel more alive.

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technology and operations

Steven Buchwald

CEO, Authenticity

Authenticity supports MMHC with technology and practice operations.
Portrait of Steven Buchwald

Expanding access to therapy and improving the quality of care should reinforce each other. That premise drives my work at Manhattan Mental Health Counseling, an insurance-based practice of 100+ clinicians serving clients across New York State.

Through Authenticity, I focus on the strategy, systems, and technology that help Manhattan Mental Health Counseling grow while strengthening the care it provides.

Good care begins before the first session: with a clear path into therapy, a thoughtful match and the ability to use insurance for ongoing care. I work with MMHC’s clinical leadership to strengthen those conditions while keeping clinical decisions where they belong, with clinicians.

Growth should make the practice better, not just bigger.

A practice this size can see patterns no single caseload can show: how clients are progressing, when progress stalls and what gets in clinicians’ way. MMHC uses brief, standardized measures across the practice. Interpreted alongside each client’s own account and the therapist’s judgment, they help clients and therapists recognize and discuss change over time. They also give the practice a firmer basis for improving the systems around care.

Technology has a precise role in this work: to reduce administrative friction and make useful information easier to see, so clinicians can keep more of their attention on clients. It belongs behind the care, supporting clinical judgment and the therapeutic relationship, never replacing either.

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Respectfully,

Steven Buchwald

CEO, Authenticity

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