The Psychologist Who Never Left La Jolla
How Dr. Stamatia Daroglou built a two-decade practice in the village of La Jolla — and why she wouldn’t have it any other way
For most people, a therapy appointment is a box on the calendar — something to get through on the way to the rest of the day. For the clients of SD Psychology, it has a tendency to become something else entirely. They park near the cove, take a walk along the water, breathe in the salt air, and by the time they reach the Ivanhoe Avenue office, they’ve already started to unwind.
That’s not an accident. It’s one of the quiet reasons Dr. Stamatia Daroglou has stayed in La Jolla for more than twenty years.
“You can spend some time in La Jolla and you automatically feel better and more relaxed. You come hang out for lunch, go sit at the cove and watch the waves for a little while, or take a walk down at La Jolla Shores — and you’ll see the difference in your emotions, in your heart rate even. People just relax.”
For anyone searching for a therapist in the village of La Jolla, Dr. Daroglou’s practice offers something that’s increasingly rare: a long-established, deeply personal presence in the community — not a franchise, not a telehealth-first operation, but a practice that has been part of the village’s fabric since 2005.
Roots in the Village
Dr. Daroglou’s path to La Jolla was anything but linear. Born in Greece, she studied in Germany before earning a scholarship to the University of Louisiana at Monroe, where she completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology. She then came west — to San Diego — for her PhD in Clinical Psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology, which she earned in 2003.
She never really left. By 2005, she had opened a private practice in La Jolla. By 2011 or 2012, she had settled into the El Patio building on Ivanhoe Avenue — the same building where she still practices today. For over a decade, La Jolla has been home base, even as her career expanded in multiple directions: forensic psychology for courts and correctional systems, clinical supervision, graduate teaching, and five years as a Behavioral Health Consultant at Naval Medical Center San Diego.
In 2019, she left the Navy and committed fully to private practice. In 2023, she formalized what had been growing organically for years and launched SD Psychology as a group practice, bringing on additional clinicians to meet the demand she could no longer handle alone.
A Practice That Feels Like a Village
SD Psychology now includes four clinicians, each with distinct specializations — trauma and PTSD, chronic illness, grief and loss, anxiety, depression, healthcare worker burnout, and couples therapy, among others. The practice serves adults from across San Diego County, but a meaningful portion of the clientele comes from the immediate neighborhood.
“We actually see a lot of people that sometimes just walk to the practice. They walk down, or bike down, because we’re just so central. And then there are also people that come from other areas of San Diego — because who doesn’t want to come to La Jolla?”
That local texture matters. La Jolla has its own particular mix — older adults, medical professionals, military families, people navigating significant life transitions. Dr. Daroglou’s background maps onto those needs in unusual ways. Her time at the Naval Medical Center gave her deep fluency in working with healthcare professionals and military communities. Her clinical specialty in psycho-oncology means she’s a trusted resource when a physician in the area wants to refer a newly diagnosed cancer patient. Her psychoanalytic and existential orientation makes her particularly well-suited to the kinds of questions that emerge when life circumstances shift suddenly and profoundly.
The Personal Touch That Scales
Even as SD Psychology has grown, Dr. Daroglou has been intentional about what doesn’t change. When someone calls the practice, they speak with a psychologist — not a scheduler, not a front-desk assistant. Intakes are handled personally. That deliberate intimacy is part of the practice’s identity.
“When someone calls us, they will get the psychologist. They’re not going to get an assistant or a scheduler. They will deal with us for everything. It stays really personal.”
That approach extends to how she thinks about therapy itself. Dr. Daroglou is careful to distinguish between crisis counseling — which has its place — and the deeper work of psychotherapy, which she sees as something that becomes possible once the acute pressure has lifted.
“Once the crisis is done, that’s when the real work of psychotherapy begins. That’s when you’re relaxed enough to look inwardly and see what’s going on — how you think about things, how your emotional world is impacting your relationships, and how you can improve those.”
She also pushes back gently on the idea that therapy is only for crisis. In her view, it’s more like preventive medicine for the mind — something to engage with consistently, not just when things go wrong.
Still Showing Up
After three decades in the field, Dr. Daroglou scores herself somewhere around a nine or ten on job satisfaction. The work still absorbs her.
“People come to us when they have the worst days of their life — a new cancer diagnosis, depression, anxiety, stressors. But also on a daily basis, when people come and try to make sense of their life. When you see how people shift — not only how their depression decreases, but when they start shifting in their thinking and understanding why they do the things they do — that is amazingly rewarding. I have never seen anyone go to therapy and not get better.”
For a practice built in and around the village of La Jolla, that’s the through line: a clinician with an unusually broad base of experience, a deeply personal approach, and twenty years of roots in one community — all available a short walk from the water.
SD Psychology is located at 7946 Ivanhoe Avenue, Suite 310, La Jolla, CA 92037. A second location serves Encinitas. Telehealth is also available. The practice accepts Aetna, TRICARE, TriWest, Medicare, and most PPO plans. New patients can reach the practice at (619) 894-1507.
