I’m Jeffery Mercer. I’ve practiced psychology since 1999, and I write about how lives take shape, what sustains them, and what makes change possible.
Where the questions come from
Some of these questions came from my work. More of them came from my life. I arrived at them the way most people arrive at the questions that matter: by running into things I couldn’t explain and needing to understand them well enough to do something about them.
For twenty-seven years I’ve worked with people trying to change patterns they already understand. I spent five years at a mental health hospital, served as a treatment director in juvenile justice, and founded and ran a group practice of psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists with three offices near Louisville. Today I direct a behavioral health department I built from scratch and am still growing. It sits inside an integrated medical practice for people recovering from injury, alongside orthopedic surgeons, pain specialists, and physical therapists, and I’m now starting a neurofeedback and biofeedback lab within it. Over those years I’ve watched patterns carry from one generation to the next, in families I’ve worked with and in my own. As a father of four, I think about what I’m passing on.
I’ve learned to hold two things at once. Looking inward is where I find most of my questions, but it isn’t where I settle them. An idea can matter deeply to me and still be wrong. It can come out of my own history and still be true of more than me. So I take what I notice in myself and in the therapy room and test it against what other fields know and against what actually happens. If it doesn’t hold up, it goes.
My graduate training is in clinical psychology. I also trained in business and economics and spent a decade in information technology. Economics taught me to look at resources, incentives, and tradeoffs. Programming taught me to ask how parts interact and where an explanation breaks.
What I bring, and what I don’t
My contribution is synthesis and translation: connecting what different fields know and making it recognizable in a life. On clinical questions I write from practice. On physics and biology I write as a careful reader, not a practitioner, and I try to credit borrowed ideas only as far as their own fields support them.
Working with AI
This work has developed through years of conversation with AI, mainly ChatGPT, with contributions from Claude and others. They have helped me draft, organize, and test explanations. They also produce confident errors and easy agreement, so their agreement is never evidence. I choose the ideas, check the claims, and take responsibility for every word published here.
An invitation
I hope this work gives you language for experiences that are hard to put into words. If you think I’ve got something wrong, I want to hear it.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, and disagreement are all welcome.
This form isn’t for clinical questions or emergencies. If you’re in crisis in the US, call or text 988, or go to your nearest emergency room.
