Meet Dr. Vento, Continued

Dr Vento continued this work in college, writing an honors thesis on lives of people experiencing homelessness with mental health problems while studying psychology and cultural anthropology at the University of California at San Diego. In her junior year, she spent two semesters as an exchange student at Chaing Mai University in northern Thailand. Living where she could at first not read or speak the language was difficult and often frustrating but helped her understand the struggles of immigrants and others who are often marginalized. She considered becoming an anthropology professor as she has been drawn to learning about other cultures from an early age. She ultimately decided to focus instead on clinical psychology, earning a doctoral degree from the University of Denver.

Drawn to a diverse community and with newfound love of green chile, she moved to Albuquerque after graduation. Her first eight years as a clinical psychologist were with the State of New Mexico working with people with developmental differences such as the Autism Spectrum and Intellectual Disabilities, adolescents struggling with violence, trauma and mental illness at the Sequoyah Adolescent Treatment Center and diagnostic psychological testing for the NM Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. Often, she heard from patients how frustrating it was to access specialized psychiatric medications. Patients sometimes felt rushed and not listened to by their prescriber with short and infrequent appointments. 

A few months after she graduated, she began clinical psychopharmacology classes at New Mexico State University and became part of the national campaign for prescriptive authority for trained psychologists. New Mexico passed the nation’s first prescribing psychologist bill in 2002. 

After completing her training and licensure to prescribe, Dr Vento's first job was at the NM State Hospital in Las Vegas, NM, learning a great deal with acute senior, adolescent and adult patients. She was the first psychologist to prescribe medications there and worked to prove herself to skeptical colleagues, eventually taking emergency call rotation for the entire hospital. Over the next 15 years, Dr. Vento worked with large and small outpatient systems including work with immigrant communities, at Indian Health Services, a LGBTQ2S+ specialty clinic, with people experiencing homelessness in Albuquerque as well as in family practice at Christus St. Vincent in Santa Fe.

In 2023, Dr Vento decided to start her own private practice in

order to have greater control over clinical decisions.

She lives with her partner, two teen step kids, three opinionated cats and a giant goofy dog.