Paging Dr. Samantha Boardman, for My Mental Health

“Self-care is important,” the psychiatrist and wife of Aby Rosen told me. “But it can also be a slippery slope to narcissism, an excuse to push away friends.”

I was feeling unsettled when I visited Samantha Boardman at her office early last month. We were there to do an interview, but I’d been secretly nursing a hope that Dr. Boardman, a psychiatrist with an Upper East Side practice, would help me resolve some nagging issues. Like many friends and colleagues, I was lethargic, less efficient than I would like to be. Was my listlessness part of a common malaise? “Some of us look back on lockdown as a time of squandered opportunities,” she said. “It’s, ‘I could have completed my screenplay, learned Mandarin or taken up bird watching.’ All these things that I call productivity porn, they can go hand in hand with self obsession.” I was taken aback. I’d lately been given to a bit of navel-gazing, soothing myself with an endless succession of herbal cleanses and long baths and limiting phone time in favor of desultory strolls. Privately I wondered, Was there a point?