Dr. Dane Rana, DO

Training built around understanding people

I completed my psychiatry residency at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where I led a quality improvement initiative expanding our interventional psychiatry suite, presented Grand Rounds on developmental trauma — the kind of early, pervasive maltreatment that too often goes unnamed because it doesn't fit neatly into a checklist definition — and built the psychodynamic thinking that still shapes how I practice today. Before that, my path ran through a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience at UCLA, where I sharpened the critical thinking I bring to every case; a Master of Science in Physiology at Georgetown, which gave me a working command of the inner workings of the human body; and my medical degree at Rocky Vista University, where I first began integrating that scientific foundation with the patient actually in front of me — work I've carried into every session since.

My psychodynamic psychotherapy training was longitudinal, beginning in the outpatient clinic years of residency.

Grand Rounds Presentation Trauma: Expanding Our Focus Play video →

A single afternoon that decided everything

I chose psychiatry because of a single afternoon during medical school. I was on a rotation at a crisis response center when a young teenager came in after her first suicide attempt. What struck me wasn't anything I did clinically. It was watching the relief move through her as she realized someone was willing to simply sit in her pain with her, without flinching and without rushing to fix it. By the end of that evaluation, something in her had softened. I have spent my career since then trying to offer that same experience — the felt sense that another person genuinely wants to understand what your life is like from the inside.

That conviction deepened in residency, where I inherited patients who had cycled through psychiatrists for years and still felt stuck. Some carried a quiet sense that they weren't thriving. Others were languishing in depression so heavy that escape had become a constant, intrusive thought. What helped them wasn't another medication trial. It was time spent uncovering long-held, often unconscious beliefs about themselves that had been quietly steering every part of their lives.

Working through those beliefs, paired with thoughtful and often simpler prescribing, brought about a kind of change that felt different from years of short medication check-ins. I built my practice so I could offer that kind of time to every patient I see — and to treat them as a person, not a diagnosis.

What I know from the inside

I also know this work from the other side of the couch. As the first-born son of a Filipino immigrant family, I grew up as the responsible one, the rock, the person who represented the family well and stayed okay when others weren't. I leaned into that role until it became unsustainable. I couldn't ask for help, couldn't set boundaries, and chased achievement without ever asking what I actually wanted.

It was my own psychodynamically informed therapist who helped me trace those patterns back to their roots and build something sturdier in their place — a sense of authenticity and agency that changed how I move through my life. I named my practice Liwanag, the Tagalog word for illumination, because that experience of coming to see oneself clearly is exactly what I hope to offer the people I work with.

That background also shapes who I hope this practice reaches. Access to culturally congruent psychiatric care has historically been limited for Filipino and Southeast Asian communities, and I'm glad when that history is part of why someone finds their way here.

• What patients notice Patients tell me they feel genuinely listened to in a way that surprises them — that I notice the small things, a word choice or a shift in tone, and take them seriously. They tell me I walk them through my thinking rather than handing down decisions, so they feel like partners in their own care.
• Outside the office You'll most likely find me cooking. I love trying an unfamiliar cuisine, asking whoever made it about the ingredients and the story behind the dish, and then recreating it at home for people I care about. When I get a dish just right and watch someone's face light up, it feels like a small act of sharing a world, and I never get tired of it.

Every part of you exists for a reason

So often people come to me wanting to fix one discrete area of their life, as if repairing that single part would finally make them whole. And when we talk about how they see themselves, there is usually an elaborate architecture behind it — years of mental gymnastics performed to convince themselves that this part of who they are is something to hate.

What I wish every patient understood is that every last part of them exists for a good reason. That reason may have long outlived its usefulness, but at its core that part once served to shield and protect them from an unimaginable alternative at a particular moment in their life.

What I find, again and again, is that when someone comes to terms with the understandability of every part of themselves — including the parts they are ashamed of — they arrive somewhere new. They can accept themselves as they are. And with that acceptance comes self-love and healing.

Education & professional background

• Psychiatry Residency — University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson
• Pursuing board certification in psychiatry — American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN)
• Quality Improvement Project Leader — Neurotherapeutics & Interventional Psychiatry Suite
• Grand Rounds Presenter: Trauma — Expanding Our Focus, on developmental trauma and childhood maltreatment
• Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) — Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine
• Master of Science in Physiology — Georgetown University
• Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience — University of California, Los Angeles