By the time someone reaches a treatment center, they’ve usually been told what their problem is. What they’ve rarely had is a clinician sit down and separate which symptoms belong to the substance, which belong to withdrawal, and which belong to a condition that was there long before the drinking or the pills started. Sorting that out is the work Dr. Lori Bohn does.
Dr. Lori Bohn, PMHNP-BC, DC, is a Board-Certified Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner at Voyager Recovery Center. With over a decade of experience in integrative medicine, she specializes in addiction psychiatry and women’s mental health. She works with clients at our Lake Forest campus across medical detox and residential inpatient care, the two levels of care Voyager delivers on site, alongside Medical Director Dr. Michael S. Valdez, MD and Executive Clinical Director Stacy Sheller, LMFT.
Professional Background & Credentials
Dr. Bohn holds advanced degrees in chiropractic, nursing, and psychiatry, and has completed fellowships in integrative and functional psychiatry.
Those three tracks explain a good deal about how she practices. The DC after her name is a doctorate in chiropractic, a whole-body clinical training she completed before her psychiatric work. PMHNP-BC is board certification as a Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, which requires graduate-level psychiatric education, supervised clinical hours with patients across the lifespan, and a national certification examination. That certification is what qualifies her to assess psychiatric conditions, form a diagnostic impression, and manage psychiatric medication.
Fellowship training in integrative and functional psychiatry adds the part that matters most in the first weeks of recovery: reading the body as part of the psychiatric picture rather than as a separate problem for someone else to handle.
Clinical Philosophy & Approach to Care
Her trauma-informed approach blends conventional and holistic care to address the root causes of mental health and substance use disorders. At Voyager, she partners closely with patients to create personalized treatment plans that support long-term healing, resilience, and whole-person recovery.
In practice, “root causes” means specific, checkable things. Heavy alcohol use flattens sleep architecture and depletes thiamine and magnesium, and both show up as anxiety and cognitive fog that look convincingly like a psychiatric disorder. Untreated thyroid dysfunction imitates depression. Iron deficiency imitates fatigue and low mood. Chronic pain that opioid use was quietly managing becomes visible again around day four. Dr. Bohn’s approach is to identify what’s physiological and correctable before deciding what needs psychiatric medication, and then to prescribe deliberately rather than broadly.
Partnership is the other half of it. That means being told what a medication is meant to do, how many weeks it needs before the effect is fair to judge, what the side effects tend to look like in week one compared with week four, and why she might recommend waiting rather than starting something during acute withdrawal. People in early recovery have often had medication decisions made around them rather than with them. This is the correction of that.
Areas of Expertise in Addiction Treatment
Her two stated specialties, addiction psychiatry and women’s mental health, overlap more than they appear to. Women tend to move from first regular use to dependence over a shorter interval than men, a pattern clinicians describe as telescoping, and they more often arrive with a co-occurring trauma history, an anxiety disorder, or a disordered eating pattern attached to the substance use. Hormonal shifts across the cycle change how craving, sleep, and anxiety present from week to week, which affects both what gets prescribed and how a plan is timed. Treating the addiction without accounting for any of that tends to produce a plan that holds for a month and then doesn’t.
Dual Diagnosis & Co-Occurring Care
The hardest question in dual diagnosis is timing. Depression measured on day three of alcohol withdrawal is not the same finding as depression measured after three weeks of stability, and treating the first as though it were the second leads to medication a person may not need and may struggle to stop. Dr. Bohn’s practice is to document symptoms carefully during detox, treat what is dangerous or intolerable immediately, and hold the diagnostic conclusion until the withdrawal picture has cleared enough for it to mean something.
Some conditions don’t wait. Psychotic symptoms, active suicidality, severe bipolar presentations, and long-standing conditions with a clear pre-substance history get treated on admission. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) both describe how frequently substance use disorders and psychiatric conditions travel together, and how poorly each one responds when the other goes untreated.
Trauma-Informed Therapies
Trauma-informed care is often described as a therapy style. In a psychiatric role it’s closer to a set of rules about how questions get asked. It means not requiring someone to narrate their worst experience to justify a medication. It means explaining a physical assessment before performing it. It means giving people genuine choices about what they take, because the loss of control at the center of most trauma histories is re-created precisely by a clinician who decides on someone’s behalf.
Those principles, drawn from the framework published by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), shape how Dr. Bohn approaches assessment, prescribing, and the handoff into therapy. Trauma-focused therapeutic work itself is delivered by Voyager’s clinical team under Executive Clinical Director Stacy Sheller, LMFT, and psychiatric care is coordinated to support it rather than run parallel to it.
Contribution to Voyager Recovery Center’s Recovery Programs
Voyager delivers medical detox and residential inpatient treatment on its Lake Forest campus. Because both happen in the same building with the same clinical team, psychiatric care doesn’t restart at each transition. The assessment Dr. Bohn begins during detox becomes the psychiatric section of the residential treatment plan, and medication started under withdrawal conditions is reviewed again once the client is stable enough for the result to be interpretable.
| Stage of Care | What Psychiatric Involvement Looks Like |
|---|---|
| Admission and Assessment | Psychiatric and medical history, current medications, prior treatment response, safety screening |
| Medical Detox | Symptom documentation, management of psychiatric distress during withdrawal, continuation of established medications where appropriate |
| Residential Inpatient | Diagnostic clarification after stabilization, medication adjustment, coordination with the therapy team |
| Step-Down and Referral | Psychiatric summary and medication plan sent to the receiving provider or referral partner |
Voyager does not run partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, or outpatient programming on its own campus. Those levels of care are arranged through a referral partner network, and the psychiatric handoff is part of what gets coordinated at discharge so that a medication plan built over several weeks isn’t lost in the transfer.
A Message from Dr. Lori Bohn to Incoming Patients and Families
Families calling on behalf of someone else usually ask a version of the same question: whether the psychiatric medications their family member is already taking will be continued, changed, or stopped, and who decides. Clients ask whether being honest about past use will change how they’re treated. Both questions deserve an answer in her own words rather than ours.
Speak with the Clinical Team at Voyager Recovery Center
If you’re weighing treatment for yourself or for someone in your family and you have questions about psychiatric care, medication, or a dual diagnosis, you can ask them before you commit to anything. Our admissions team can explain how assessment works, what happens to a current prescription at admission, and what the first week actually looks like.
Call (949) 991-6279 or reach the Voyager Recovery Center admissions team. Calls are confidential, and someone answers at any hour.