Dr. Shapiro brings something rare to addiction medicine: a psychiatrist who has spent his career at the intersection of the mind, the aging brain, and the biology of dependence and who understands that these things are never separate.

He completed his medical degree, internship, residency, and fellowship entirely within the UCLA School of Medicine, one of the premier psychiatric training programs in the country. His fellowship was in Geriatric Psychiatry, a specialty that demands a particular attentiveness to how neurobiology, life history, and human vulnerability interact because the patients who arrive in that discipline have decades of both behind them. He is board-certified in Psychiatry, Geriatric Psychiatry, and Addiction Medicine, the last of which he pursued and earned in 2018 through the American Board of Addiction Medicine. He currently practices at UCLA Behavioral Health Associates in Santa Monica.

That combination of credentials isn’t incidental. A psychiatrist trained in how the brain changes across a lifetime, who then went deeper into the specific neurobiology of addiction, brings a clinical perspective that goes well beyond symptom management. Dr. Shapiro understands that what presents as a substance problem is almost always a more complex story involving the brain, the body, mental health, and the circumstances of a person’s life.

At Royal Recovery, he provides the medical foundation that serious treatment requires: the oversight, the diagnostic depth, and the clinical judgment to manage what detox and early recovery demand of a person physiologically. Patients are in skilled hands.