Spotlight: Morgan Azan

In this post, we go behind the scenes of Happier Living to meet one of our amazing staff members who helps make it easier for our clinicians to focus on their clients.

Happier Living’s Director of Onboarding & Clinician Support Morgan Azan has been with the company for four years, landing right in the midst of the pandemic.

“As we know, this was a major disrupter for the world, which obviously had a massive impact on mental health,” says Morgan. “That was one of the major reasons why the position spoke to me. Though I am not a therapist or psychiatrist, having a connection to an impact on the mental health of others has always been something that has been attractive to me. If I can, in any way, be in support of folks getting the help that they need, I'm all for that.”

Before Happier Living, Morgan, who grew up in the Caribbean, worked in the tourism and hospitality field. While this might seem a long way from mental health, she believes the two are more closely related than people might realize.

“Tourism is a massive driver for us, and being of service to others is just part of the culture,” says Morgan, who has lived in Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and St. Lucia, along with a handful of other countries outside the Caribbean. “I feel like it ties in really well: the culture of service and service to others and helping others, whether it be to have a good time or to see and do things that are different and interesting, or to promote self-care.”

While Happier Living’s clinicians support the clients, Morgan and her team support the clinicians. “On the back end of it, from an onboarding clinician support perspective, I am of service to all the clinicians and, of course, my team members, and that's appealing to me just because it's part of my DNA, and it's always there in any position I've ever held in any country in the world, whether it be within the Caribbean or in Canada, in the U.S., in Europe,” she says. “Wherever I have lived and worked, being of service to others has always been paramount. I'm grateful to be part of the Happier Living team where I'm able to be of service to all of those people who can then go on to be of amazing service and care to all the clients that they see and make a huge impact on their lives.”

Her own personal experience with therapy growing up also led her to Happier Living – and to the appreciation of the level of care the clinicians are able to provide because of the company’s comprehensive and compassionate approach.

In college, Morgan’s mental health suffered. “I remember going to the university's health center and being assigned a psychiatrist who didn't take more than five minutes with me to really understand what was going on before she was prescribing medication, and I was on several different things for a number of months, none of which really worked, and she never really got to know me,” she says.

It wasn't until she started working closely with a therapist who was well versed in talk therapy and who wanted to work with her and work through what was going on in her life without just writing a prescription to get her out of her office, did she start feeling better and begin to understand how helpful therapy could be if approached right.

“What really speaks to me is Happier Living’s culture of therapy,” she says. Rather than pushing medication on clients and then pushing them out, Happier Living’s clinicians take the necessary time to get to know them first, according to Morgan.

“The approach is, ‘We want to get to know you. We want to develop a relationship with you, a therapeutic alliance,’” says Morgan. “Given my own personal experience, I respect and I'm so grateful for that part of our mission to serve people in a way that cares about them. Instead of just trying to see as many people as possible in the shortest time possible, writing the medication, getting on with it, we want to spend longer with every person, have more frequent sessions with each person, and make sure that we hire folks to the team that share that message, and that the mission resonates with them. For me, that’s really what sets Happier Living apart from any other mental health group that is out there.”

Morgan is passionate for all things transformative, especially now that she is a new mom. “Music, dance, travel, those are my favorite things to do,” she says. And she loves doing them all with her son. 

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