Dr. Ashley Brooks Deaton, MD

After 2 appointments decided to discontinue seeing Dr. Deaton. It was hard to make a connection with her. She seemed distant & i didn’t feel she heard my concerns.

Dr. Deaton was my doctor for over two years while I was living in Austin, and she was absolutely instrumental in getting me out of the deep depression I was in and onto the road to recovery. Years later, I am still constantly amazed by how much her expertise and insight continues to help me now navigate daily life with a mental illness. She is highly intelligent both emotionally and intellectually, and I could not have asked for a better doctor. I wish I still lived in Austin to see her!

I have been under Doctor Deatons care for nearly seven years. Doctor Deaton was not my first psychiatrist. I bounced from doc to doc looking for a good fit. I wanted a mental health provider who was knowlegable and had good instincts but also a good listener and someone I could trust. She has always treated me with the utmost respect and I have always felt safe knowing I could call on her for help at any time. I am very fortunate to have found what I was looking for in Dr Deaton. Not only is she a great doctor but she's an even better human being.

Only psychiatrist I have seen but no warmth very uncomfortable experience

At the insistence of several of my physicians and my mental health practitioner that I should do so, I am finally giving my review for Dr. Deaton. I think she is well meaning and did not intentionally mean to do me harm, but she added greatly to my psychological distress when I was already severely depressed due to having fallen ill with a terrible condition gastroparesis that caused my weight to plummet from 127 to 106 in a 12 week period. I was slowly gaining weight thanks to a motility drug when my husband brought me to Dr. Deaton for the severe depression and anxiety I had developed from the realization that I had a terrible incurable condition, coupled with my research adding up to this and other symptoms lining up with autonomic neuropathy, a neurodegenerative disease that destroys your autonomic nervous system and culminates in early death due to heart damage. Dr. Deaton assured my husband and family that there was nothing seriously wrong with me, resulting in my avoidant… husband, now diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, in failing to get me proper medical care or diagnosis. On my own, seriously ill, in a new town, with a 7 year old, I had to find my way to the proper doctors to get diagnosed and treated. When I asked Dr. Deaton how she was sure that I was a hypochondriac and not actually seriously ill, she told me she just knew from experience that I was, that there was no doubt in her mind. I actually asked her if I turned out to be seriously ill would she be shocked and she said yes. (Please understand that I had already nearly ended up on a feeding tube, how one could not think that that alone indicated serious illness of some sort I'm not sure) I then asked her, how many of her patients actually ended up being ill and not hypochondriacs and she said, none. When I shared this with my general practitioner recently , she said to me, "Do. you actually believe that you were the only seriously ill patient who had not yet been fully medically diagnosed but was clearly experiencing major physical symptoms that she diagnosed as depressed due to hypochondria instead of depressed because of the ramifications of being actually seriously ill? Believe me, plenty of very ill but not yet diagnosed people have crossed her path and been mistreated in the same way".. I was not mistaken, I do have gastroparesis and am now in the late stages of autonomic meuropathy. i have damage to much of my nervous system including my heart, as well as other problems. I could die any day of cardiac arrest. Not only did I not get the support I needed to help me face the terror of what was ahead of me, or even to just get support around the horror of falling to 106 pounds and nearly ending up on a feeding tube, something that had already occurred when I saw her, but in the short term it also undermined my getting proper medical attention and support from my family. Indeed it played right into the hands of my now diagnosed as "narcissistic personality disorder" husband, who has been unable to deal with the reality of an ill spouse. He continued to call me a hypochondriac based on Dr Deatons diagnosis of my long beyond any plausibility. I was traumatized to be so ill and so depressed on top of that because of it and having to spend week after week in her office being told that I was mentally ill with hypochondria , when I knew otherwise - but I was so fragile at the time that I had no choice but to keep going to appease my husband. I would like to add a statistic, a large study of diagnosed autoimmune patients revealed that it had taken them an average of 3 years and 5 physicians before they were properly diagnosed from the time they became symptomatic and knew something was wrong. In that time 40 percent said that at least one family member or friend accused them of hypochondria. That is heart breaking. But what is more troubling is that Dr. Deaton is not a layman, she is a physician and a supposed expert in mental health. I wouldn't expect her to be on the list of those who mislabel and mistreat the truly ill. Autonomic neuropathy is not for the faint of heart. It's a devastating life sentence. But at least my mental health practitioners since then have helped me instead of making an already difficult journey worse.

Very personal, genuinely cares and knows her stuff.