There is a particular kind of Land O' Lakes calendar, and if you keep one you will recognize it: pediatrician on Tuesday, orthodontist consult Thursday, practice pickup at half past five, and somewhere near the bottom, crossed out twice, "make appointment for me." Finding a psychiatrist in Land O' Lakes usually means adding a trip out of town and a weeks-long wait to a schedule that has no room for either. Ascend Mind and Body takes the logistics out of it entirely: psychiatric care by secure video with Anna Stouffer, PMHNP-BC, same-week appointments for most new patients, and one number, (813) 670-3005.
Two numbers outrank everything else on this page. Immediate danger: 911. A suicidal or mental health crisis, any hour: call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Your appointments come last: a central Pasco pattern
Central Pasco filled up with young families fast. Connerton, Ballantrae, Oakstead, and the newer subdivisions around them are dense with households where one or two adults run logistics for everybody, and the adult who does the scheduling is reliably the last person to get scheduled. It is not a discipline problem. When a psychiatric intake demands a specific weekday slot, a round trip, and a waiting room, the parent doing three school runs simply loses the eligibility contest to everyone else in the house.
The cost of deferring is quiet but cumulative. Anxiety that gets managed by white-knuckling, depression that gets renamed "just tired," ADHD that makes the family logistics themselves twice as hard as they need to be. In many cases the person carrying all this has already diagnosed the barrier accurately: not unwillingness, but a care model that assumes a free afternoon they have not had since 2019.
There is also the odd guilt arithmetic parents run, where a child's check-up is non-negotiable and their own mental health visit is the first thing sacrificed when the week tightens. Flip the logic around once: the adult running the household is the household's single point of failure, and maintenance on that adult is not indulgence. It is the same reasoning that gets the minivan its oil change.
A visit that fits inside the day you already have
Telehealth changes the eligibility math. A 60-minute initial evaluation happens from your kitchen table while the house is at school. The 30-minute follow-up fits into the flat middle of the day without touching pickup time. Nothing to arrange around, nothing to leave early for, nothing about sitting in a lobby adding up how late you will be. The appointment stops competing with the carpool because it no longer occupies the same category of time.
Worth saying clearly: this is a statement about format, not about clinic hours, and speed of access is not speed of relief. Psychiatric medications generally need weeks to show what they can do. What the format buys you is a start date this week instead of next month, and a follow-up cadence you can actually keep, which is where medication management succeeds or quietly falls apart.
The clinical quality question has a documented answer. The American Psychiatric Association has stated that for outpatient medication management, telehealth care is comparable to in-person care. Visits run on Zoom for Healthcare with a Business Associate Agreement in place, HIPAA-compliant by design, and your secure link lands by email or text about 30 minutes before the appointment. Prescriptions go by ePrescribe to your regular pharmacy, and stable refills usually do not require an extra visit beyond the schedule set at your initial.
Service reach follows the license, which attaches to the state rather than the city. This page speaks to central Pasco, Land O' Lakes across 34637, 34638, and 34639, plus Wesley Chapel, Lutz, Odessa, and Trinity, but any Florida resident can be seen.
Conditions on the schedule, and how medication management works
Anna Stouffer, PMHNP-BC treats the adult outpatient range. Depression, including major depressive disorder, persistent depressive disorder, postpartum depression, and seasonal patterns, along with cases where a first or second antidepressant fell short. Anxiety disorders: generalized anxiety, panic disorder, social anxiety, health anxiety. Adult ADHD through diagnosis, medication initiation, and ongoing management, inside the current federal stimulant rules noted below. Bipolar I and II with mood stabilization and hypomania workups. PTSD with medication managed as part of a wider trauma plan, frequently in coordination with a trauma-focused therapist, and OCD where medication supports ERP-based therapy.
Parents often arrive here after recognizing themselves in a child's ADHD workup, and that is a legitimate path to an evaluation, but it is a path to an evaluation, not a diagnosis. Symptom overlap across depression, anxiety, ADHD, and mood disorders is exactly why the first appointment runs a full hour with a clinician instead of ten minutes with a checklist.
The practice also keeps honest edges. Not treated here: active substance use disorders needing detox or MAT-only care, active psychosis, eating disorders requiring a higher level of care, and patients under 18, which means your teenager's care would be arranged elsewhere even as yours happens here. Callers outside the scope get help finding the right level of care.
A note for new parents on the postpartum stretch
Postpartum depression sits on the list of conditions treated here, and it deserves its own paragraph because the barriers are at their absolute worst exactly when it strikes. A parent with a newborn is sleep-broken, feeding on a two-hour cycle, and about as able to attend a distant weekday appointment as to fly. Video removes the leaving-the-house problem entirely; the baby can be asleep on your chest during the evaluation and nobody on either end of the call will find that unusual.
What this page will not do is tell you whether what you are feeling is postpartum depression, ordinary newborn exhaustion, or something else. That line is genuinely hard to see from inside, which is the strongest reason to put the question to a clinician rather than to a search bar at 3 a.m. If the darker thoughts ever include harming yourself, skip the scheduling entirely: 988 answers at 3 a.m. too.
One prescriber from the first visit on
Every visit is with Anna. She is a board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner with full prescriptive authority in Florida, and the sole psychiatric prescriber at Ascend, so the person adjusting your dose in month six is the person who chose the starting dose in month one. There is no scheduling roulette to manage, which matters twice over for someone whose calendar is already a spreadsheet. For a patient whose bandwidth is already spent running other people's appointments, not having to rebuild context with a new prescriber each visit is not a luxury; it is the difference between care that compounds and care that resets.
Her style is practical: what the medication does, which side effects are worth a call, what the realistic timeline is, and what would make her change course. An honest clinic does not guarantee outcomes, and this one will not either; the commitment is monitoring, plain explanations, and a plan that adapts on evidence.
Why we ask to hear from someone who knows you
With your written consent, and only with it, a psychiatric assessment often gets meaningfully better when one other person contributes ten minutes. A spouse, a parent, an adult child, sometimes a close friend. This is not a check on your honesty. It is that several of the things we most need to know are, by their nature, hard to observe from the inside.
Consider what the question is actually asking. Whether your sleep improved is something a partner in the same house can often answer more precisely than you can, because you were asleep for the part that matters. Whether irritability has changed is notoriously invisible to the person feeling it and obvious to everyone living with it. Whether a period of unusually high energy looked like productivity or looked alarming from the outside is nearly impossible to self-report accurately, and that particular question can change a diagnosis. So can a family history of mood disorder that nobody in the household has ever discussed out loud.
The mechanics are deliberately small. It is usually a few minutes at the end of a visit, or a short separate call, covering two or three specific questions rather than a general interview. You decide who, whether, and what they are asked about. You can revoke the consent at any point, and plenty of patients never involve anyone, which is entirely their call and changes nothing about the quality of care they receive.
Where it earns its keep most reliably is in ADHD assessment, where the diagnostic criteria genuinely reference childhood symptoms that a parent may remember far better than you do, and in tracking the early weeks of a new medication, where the people around you often notice a change several days before you feel it. The offer stands, it is never a requirement, and the reason it is offered at all is that a second vantage point occasionally catches the thing that would otherwise take six months to find.
What the first hour covers
Intake forms are completed online before the visit, and the useful prep is a list: current medications including anything over the counter, psychiatric medications tried in the past, and prior diagnoses if any. The 60-minute evaluation itself moves through present symptoms, medical and family psychiatric history, earlier treatment, and your goals, and ends with a plan explained in plain language: the recommended medication, the reasoning, the side effects to watch, the timeline to expect. A started prescription reaches your pharmacy by ePrescribe before the call closes.
Privacy at home is the one logistical wrinkle worth planning for. A bedroom with the door shut works, and so, honestly, does the car in the driveway with the air conditioning on, a solution half of central Pasco has independently invented. The visit needs a camera, a connection, and enough quiet to talk plainly; it does not need the house to be empty.
Follow-ups run 30 minutes, the first at roughly 4 to 6 weeks, then stretching to every 1 to 3 months as things stabilize. Most new patients get that initial evaluation booked within a week of calling, cancellation slots surface regularly, and the morning is the right time to call (813) 670-3005 about same-day openings.
Insurance, superbills, and rates by phone
The coverage picture: in-network with Aetna, ChampVA, and UnitedHealthcare for primary care, with status differing by carrier and plan, verified before your appointment when you call (813) 670-3331 with your insurance card. Out-of-network patients get superbills carrying diagnosis and CPT codes for direct submission, and PPO plans typically reimburse a portion of out-of-network psychiatric services. Telehealth visits are covered by many plans with plan-specific cost-sharing. Self-pay rates are discussed when our team calls you back, reachable at (813) 670-3005; no figures live on this page because stale numbers help no one.
If it stops being routine
Medication management is scheduled care, and some weeks refuse to be scheduled. Clinical questions that are not emergencies go to (813) 670-3005 between visits and get routed to Anna or a covering clinician. Anything that feels like danger is different: 911 for immediate risk, and 988 by call or text for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, staffed 24/7. Parents sometimes hesitate to use crisis lines because the house depends on them; that is an argument for calling, not against it.
Therapy alongside medication is normal and encouraged where it fits. The split model with a separate therapist is standard, Anna coordinates with written consent, and Ascend's therapy team covers Land O' Lakes by Florida telehealth as well. Nearby psychiatry pages: Wesley Chapel and Tampa in person, Lakeland in Polk County, Brandon and St. Petersburg by telehealth.
Also see our nearby psychiatry options
Looking for in-person care, or comparing across Tampa Bay clinics?
- Psychiatry in Wesley Chapel: in-person at our Pasco County hub (legal practice address)
- Psychiatry in Tampa: in-person at our Carrollwood office
- Psychiatry in Lakeland: in-person at our Polk County office
- Psychiatry in Brandon: telehealth, eastern Hillsborough
- Psychiatry in St. Petersburg: telehealth, across Tampa Bay
If you need talk therapy alongside medication, our therapy team serves Land O' Lakes via Florida telehealth: talk therapy in Land O' Lakes.
FAQs about psychiatry in Land O' Lakes
Why doesn't Ascend have a Land O' Lakes office?
Ascend has no Land O' Lakes office. Our Wesley Chapel flagship at 27724 Cashford Circle, Suite 102, Wesley Chapel, FL 33544 serves as our Pasco County hub. Building a second Pasco psychiatry office in Land O' Lakes would not improve outcomes; the American Psychiatric Association has stated that telehealth psychiatry is comparable to in-person care for outpatient med management. If you'd prefer in-person, the Wesley Chapel office is the short drive.
Will I see the same psychiatric provider every time?
Yes. Anna Stouffer is the sole psychiatric prescriber on the Ascend team. You see her for the initial. You see her for every follow-up. There is no rotating-provider panel and no "next available" lottery.
Can Anna prescribe ADHD stimulant medication via telehealth?
This is governed by current DEA and Florida telehealth-prescribing rules, which have changed several times since 2023 and may change again. As of now, controlled-substance prescriptions for ADHD typically require an in-person evaluation under federal rules. We will tell you upfront whether your situation can be managed via telehealth or requires an in-person visit at our Wesley Chapel or Tampa-Carrollwood offices. Once an in-person evaluation has occurred, ongoing telehealth follow-ups are usually permitted.
How quickly can I get an appointment?
Most new patients schedule the initial within one week. Same-day cancellation slots open up regularly. Call (813) 670-3005 in the morning to ask about same-day availability.
Can I see Anna for psychiatry and someone else for therapy?
Yes. The split-treatment model (psychiatry with one provider, therapy with another) is standard practice. Anna will coordinate with your therapist with your written consent. If you want both under one roof, our talk-therapy team also serves Land O' Lakes via telehealth: see our Land O' Lakes therapy page.
Is telehealth psychiatry covered by my insurance?
Telehealth visits are covered by many plans, though coverage and cost-sharing vary by plan. Coverage depends on your specific plan. We provide superbills for out-of-network reimbursement on PPO plans, which typically cover a portion for psychiatric services.
What if I'm having a psychiatric crisis between visits?
If you are in immediate danger, call 911. For the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, call or text 988, available 24/7. For non-emergency clinical questions between visits, contact our office at (813) 670-3005 and we'll route the message to Anna or a covering clinician.
Sources
- American Psychiatric Association, telepsychiatry position statements and outcome evidence for medication management
- DEA and HHS, telemedicine controlled-substance prescribing rules and current flexibilities
- 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text, 24/7)
- Florida Board of Nursing, PMHNP certification and prescriptive authority in Florida