Dr. Bernice Ponce de Leon
DO · Board-Certified Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist
Quick facts
Conditions Treated
Common Concerns
Psychiatric Approaches
What patients say
"Dr. Ponce de Leon is wonderful with teens. She listens and explains things clearly. My son feels comfortable with her."
"Excellent child psychiatrist. Very thorough and genuinely cares about her patients."
"Dr. Ponce de Leon has been amazing with our adolescent. Professional, compassionate, and effective."
"Great experience. She really understands teenagers and provides excellent care."
About Dr. Ponce de Leon
Dr. Bernice Ponce de Leon is a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist dedicated to delivering culturally informed, evidence-based mental health care for children and adolescents. She combines careful medication management with psychotherapy tailored to each young person's developmental stage and unique needs.
Dr. Ponce de Leon believes in a collaborative, family-centered approach. She works closely with adolescents and their families to develop comprehensive treatment plans that address emotional, behavioral, and developmental challenges while building resilience and coping skills.
Dr. Ponce de Leon earned her Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree from Touro University Nevada and completed a general psychiatry residency at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She completed her child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of Southern California, one of the nation's leading programs.
She is board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and holds medical licenses in both California and Nevada. Her specialized training in child and adolescent psychiatry enables her to provide developmentally appropriate, culturally sensitive care to young patients.
How Dr. Ponce de Leon approaches treatment
Dr. Ponce de Leon is the only child and adolescent psychiatrist at SavantCare, which means families seeking specialized psychiatric care for a young person are not working with a general adult psychiatrist who also sees teens. Her fellowship training at the University of Southern California specifically prepared her to evaluate and treat the developmental, emotional, and neurological picture of a child or adolescent rather than applying an adult psychiatric model downward.
Her DO training adds a dimension that shapes how she reads a young patient's presentation. Behavioral and emotional symptoms in children and adolescents frequently have physical contributors, including sleep dysregulation, nutritional factors, and developmental timing, and her osteopathic background means those factors enter her evaluation rather than being filtered out by a purely psychiatric lens.
In practice, her approach is family-centered, which means parents and caregivers are active participants in the treatment process rather than waiting room observers. For conditions like ADHD, anxiety, and early-onset mood disorders, the home and school environment is part of the clinical picture, and treatment plans that don't account for family dynamics tend to produce limited results regardless of how well the medication or therapy is calibrated.
Her patients also have access to SavantCare's 1:1 trauma-informed yoga sessions, which she coordinates alongside treatment for adolescents managing trauma, PTSD, and anxiety, where building body awareness and nervous system regulation can support therapeutic progress in an age-appropriate way.