THE PRACTICE IS CLOSED TO NEW PATIENTS and ALL APPOINTMENTS ARE OFFERED ONLY REMOTELY, BY VIDEO.
In a collaborative effort to tailor care to each patient’s needs, Dr. Salomon offers traditional psychotherapies, modern psychopharmacology, and principles of psychosomatic medicine to address complex psychiatric problems.
Psychotherapy is part of every session, and it has many forms. Therapy techniques are fitted to patient needs, whether the visit is a 30-minute “follow-up”, 45- or 60-minute full therapy session. When more specialized therapies are indicated, Dr Salomon may refer a patient to a qualified colleague, such specialists in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (tf-CBT), or CBT for insomnia (CBT-i).
Dr Salomon worked in academic Psychiatry for over 30 years, treating patients in hospital and clinical settings, teaching students, residents and fellows, and studying mechanisms underlying depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders including obsessive compulsive disorder, and the psychotic disorders.
Dr Salomon has extensive experience in working with mind-body problems that arise when medical illnesses (or their medications) affect the psyche. People with complex medical issues require special care in psychiatry. For example, important effects of inflammatory responses are seen in many psychiatric illnesses.
Dr Salomon has contributed considerably to the psychosomatic and psychopharmacology literature, especially in studies of biorhythms of brain systems that are related to depression, or chronopsychiatry. Publications are listed at MyNCBI: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=salomon+rm and at Web Of Science (sometimes more complete): http://www.researcherid.com/rid/R-9247-2016.
Dr Salomon studied biology as an undergrad at M.I.T., completing a neuro-immunology project related to multiple sclerosis. After graduating, a research mentor encouraged Dr Salomon to apply to schools in Europe. High school French classes finally became useful at the University of Liege (pronounced almost like lee-edge) in Belgium! One of the oldest medical schools in Europe, Liege provided a formidable medical teaching tradition and a very current, rigorous introduction to the art of medicine.
Dr Salomon completed a psychiatry residency at the University of Connecticut and remained there on faculty for three years, providing outpatient and consultation-liaison psychiatry services, teaching, and conducting basic neuroscience research. He worked at Yale University for four years as focus on role of a major brain neurotransmitter, serotonin, was growing in depression. After following this and other lines of research for another 18 years at Vanderbilt, in 2014 Dr Salomon joined the faculty at the Feinberg-Northwestern School of Medicine in Chicago. Then, from 2015 through 2018 he continued teaching, clinical care and research work, often collaborating with Dr Delgado at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Finally, with changes in family life he returned to Nashville in July 2018 to practice psychiatry. New changes in family life in 2025 have resulted in a transition to part time practice and all remote telehealth care.
Depression treatments and the brain mechanisms involved in mood disorders have remained central through the entirety of Dr Salomon’s research career. He has published papers on depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and schizophrenia. Many of these studies examined the mechanisms of brain activity involved in these illnesses. Diverse studies involved consultations and collaborations with experts in neurology, neurosurgery, radiology, mathematics, biomedical engineering, law, business, and informatics and other fields.
Over the years Dr Salomon has collaborated with many mentors and colleagues, recognizing especially Drs Herbert Y Meltzer, Pedro L Delgado, Arnold Mandell, Dennis Charney, Ronald Cowan, Richard Shelton, Douglas Bremner, Richard Shiavi, D Mitchell Wilkes, and Steven Hollon. Training residents and students and mentoring other researchers have also been invaluable parts of his career. Collaborations extended throughout the country and sometimes even abroad in pursuits to understand depression and other major psychiatric illnesses.
The Biorhythm Connection: A central, organizing feature of Dr. Salomon’s research has been to understand the influences of intrinsic oscillatory rhythms on brain activity, in particular for serotonin dysfunction in depression. Most work focused on fluctuations in activity over time. Evidence of important circadian, ultradian (hours) and other rhythms were found for neurotransmitters, and also in many other domains. The research path often branched in surprising and unexpected ways that created a view of shared deficits in oscillatory features among a wide variety of psychoneurological systems.
Studies at Yale in the early 1990’s while working with Dr Delgado and others emphasized the effects of a special diet of carefully controlled mixtures of amino acid powders (not unlike certain diet ‘protein shakes’) on critical serotonin responses to antidepressants and the maintenance of a normal mood. Studies at Vanderbilt with both healthy and depressed participants linked a natural variability over time in serotonin activity with healthy moods, a variability in activity that appears to be diminished in depression. Later, the loss of variability over time was also seen in other depression measures, showing the same relationship with health even over a wide range of time scales. The data strongly support a view that healthy variability in neurobiological activities might be more important than momentary amounts of various markers, and that the shared feature among many pathway deficits in depression is tied to their losses of rhythmicity.
Though needing further study and replication, it appears that antidepressants restore healthy fluctuations in many brain activities. The initial studies showed this healthy variability in relatively short, approximately 90-minute cycles in CSF neurochemistry. The cycles appeared to be blunted, or less variable, in depression. Numerous other approaches used in our studies suggested, consistently, that a loss of variability is more informative than the level of activity level itself. This loss of variability applied to a number of chemical and other systems in the brain, not only the major monoamine neurotransmitters. For example, studies also suggested that this same pattern may applies to behavioral changes, e.g., in vocal expression in depression, often resulting in a flat- or hollow-sounding voice.
If antidepressant medicines enhance and restore the normal levels of variability by quietly activating numerous rhythms that interact with one another, we may be able to watch for behavioral variability as a sign of antidepressant benefits, or conversely, as a sign of impending relapse. Diminished daily (roughly “circadian”) rhythms in behavior are well known symptoms of depression, with a blunting of the oscillatory amplitudes in many markers in depression and in key biorhythms (sleep, appetite, energy). To explore this further, later studies used functional MRI to examine rhythms in the small brain regions that make the major neurotransmitters. To do this, activity rhythms in these regions were compared to activity rhythms elsewhere. This is very challenging, since the centers that contain serotonin neurons are very small and they are hidden deep in the part of the brain called the brainstem. Indeed, the very measure of “functional connectivity” between brain regions is based on synchronous variability, not the momentary amount of activity.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, all this seemingly esoteric research actually helps in the clinical office, where the symptoms of depression and mood changes often reflect a loss of daily and other cycles. The effects of medicines on restoring these cycles appears to be critically important. There, in a short summary, is a background for principles Dr Salomon tries to integrate into his practice of psychiatry.
Music City Psychiatry 