On her personal growth path, Silvia undertook direct studies with internationally renowned figures, including Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Tony Robbins, and distinguished yoga and meditation masters. Her dedication led her to become a Board-certified life coach, a certified meditation and mindfulness teacher, and a certified yoga instructor. Her passion for mind-body medicine drove her to complete The Herbert Benson, MD Course in Mind-Body Medicine, a collaboration with the Harvard Medical School. Additionally, she pursued studies in Functional Nutrition and Principles of Functional Medicine at The Institute of Functional Medicine.

In parallel with her thriving business career, Silvia confronted a relentless and chronic depression that posed an enduring challenge in her life. With the same determination she applied to her entrepreneurial ventures, she embarked on a resolute journey to find healing. Over the course of 25 years, she explored more than 60 diverse programs, treatments, and retreats. These ranged from conventional medical approaches and therapies to spiritual and personal growth quests. Unfortunately, none provided the sustained relief she sought, offering only fleeting glimpses of respite. It was an arduous and exhausting journey that while gave her a deep understanding of the condition it ultimately failed to provide lasting wellbeing.

In the midst of her discouragement, after countless failed attempts to find relief, Silvia had a profound realization: the key to successful healing lies in addressing all dimensions of a person simultaneously, rather than focusing solely on the body, mind, or spirit as most treatments do. Additionally, she recognized the vital importance of implementing the teachings in daily life, understanding that without this cohesion, true healing would remain elusive. Driven by this insight, she delved into the science of habit formation and breaking established patterns.

Armed with this knowledge, she embarked on her most ambitious project to date — healing herself. She assessed all 60 plus treatments and programs she had undergone, handpicking those that had yielded partial but promising results. From these selections, she crafted a comprehensive recovery plan that amalgamated the most impactful teachings encompassing physical and emotional health, mental programming, and spiritual enlightenment. In this personalized recovery program, she selected the most effective elements, then tailored them to specifically address depression and finally transformed all that into practical daily practices that she used to build a daily routine.

Through persistence and repetition, these routines evolved into her daily habits, yielding surprising results in her energy levels and emotional well-being. These daily habits not only transformed her biochemistry and improved the functioning of her body and brain but also restored emotional balance and granted her inner peace. Remarkably, her self-designed program eradicated 25 years of depression symptoms, leaving her depression-free ever since.

The program she put together in 2020 forms the core of our 45-Day Depression Recovery Intensive Program. This foundation was later enriched through collaborations with neurologists, psychiatrists, functional medicine doctors, psychotherapists, and experts in yoga and mindfulness.

Following her recovery, Silvia immersed herself in initiatives aimed at fostering both physical and emotional well-being. In 2022, she was inspired to share her program with the world, giving rise to The Healing Depression Project. Helping others break free from depression became her life's purpose and helping others to heal, imbuing her years of suffering with profound significance.

Her book, What If It's NOT Depression? Your Guide to Answers and Solutions, launched in February 2020 and became an International Bestseller in 3 categories on Amazon Kindle. It is also available as an audiobook AND print book.

She has a companion program to her book called What If It's Not Depression? Bootcamp to provide an alternative to medication for people with chronic mild depression-like symptoms that do not respond to antidepressant medications. She also offers a course on how to manage antidepressant withdrawal symptoms and “Taper Off SSRI."

Dr. Achina Stein is an osteopathic physician (DO) who graduated from Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine in 1990 (formerly known as UMDNJ - School of Osteopathic Medicine) and has been in practice as a board-certified psychiatrist for 25 plus years. Her osteopathic roots set her apart from the conventional psychiatrists because of her use of osteopathic philosophy and bio-psycho-social treatment approach. Initially on a psychoanalytic track, she became well trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy and CBT and does psychotherapy with several people with underlying trauma issues, specifically mood and dissociative disorders. She has much experience working with the prison population, community mental health center with the chronic and persistent mental health population, and geriatric psychiatry inpatient population. She understood the limitations of treatment with medication and continually searched for other modalities of treatment. Propelled by her son's health crisis in 2010, she found functional medicine which resolved all his health problems as well as her own and since then, has been practicing functional medicine.

Dr. Stein is presently in private practice in Providence, RI and co-owner of Functional Mind, LLC. She has lived in RI since 2000 with her husband and has three adult children. She enjoys playing ultimate frisbee, singing and gardening.

Dr. Toups has been practicing Psychiatry for over 30 years, and Functional Medicine Psychiatry for more than a decade. She has been a featured speaker at national and international medical conferences on Dementia and Functional Medicine Psychiatry topics, as well as a frequent guest on podcasts and summits. She has been the Principal Investigator on over 100 clinical research trials.

Dr. Toups was formerly an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at U.C. Davis, where she was the Inpatient Residency Training Director, and later the founder and Medical Director of the Bay Area Research Institute, a Clinical Trials Research Center in the San Francisco Bay Area. After 12 years serving as the Principal Investigator on over 100 clinical trials, including 20 failed trials for Alzheimer's medications, she finally realized that the elusive cure for brain and psychiatric illness was not going to be found in a pill.

In 2009, Dr. Toups attended a “Food as Medicine” conference that opened her eyes to the power of nutritional interventions and learned about Functional Medicine—a paradigm that could help patients to really get well by working to uncover and correct the root causes of their illness. She went on to complete all of the advanced training for certification at the Institute for Functional Medicine, and scores of other functional and environmental medicine and infectious disease trainings. Since that time, her practice has been devoted exclusively to functional medicine psychiatry and functional approaches for treating cognitive impairment and dementia.

Dr. Toups is also the author of an upcoming book, Dementia Demystified.