Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Kardaras is an Ivy-League educated psychologist, a best-selling author and one of the country’s foremost experts on adolescent and young adult mental health, addiction and the clinical impacts of the digital age. With over twenty years of both clinical expertise and operational experience creating, developing and running pioneering and nationally recognized treatment programs, Dr. Kardaras had been the Founder and CEO of Omega Recovery in Austin, TX and Maui Recovery in Hawaii, both programs that specialized in treating young adults. Before that, he had been the Executive Director of the Dunes in East Hampton, one of the country’s premier drug and alcohol rehab centers.
Dr. Kardaras is also a Clinical Professor at Stony Brook Medicine’s School of Social Welfare where he specializes in teaching the treatment of addiction and mental health, and has also taught neuropsychology at the doctoral-level. He is also the author of the best-selling “Glow Kids” (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), considered the seminal book on the clinical, neurological and sociological aspects of Technology Addiction (Smart Phones, Video Games, Social Media, etc.) which has now been translated into 15 languages. In addition, he is the author of “Digital Madness” (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) and “How Plato and Pythagoras Can Save Your Life” (Conari, 2011) and often uses philosophy to treat young people who are struggling with a crisis or are seeking to find meaning in their lives.
Dr, Kardaras has appeared on ABC’s 20/20, the Dr. Phil Show, Good Morning America, the CBS Evening News, CNN, FOX & Friends, NPR PBS, the BBC and has written for TIME Magazine, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Salon, The NY Daily News, and FOX News, and has been featured in Esquire, New York Magazine and Vanity Fair. He was also featured on the 2019 A&E TV series “Digital Addiction”, the A&E documentary “Youth in Crisis” as well as the documentaries “Screened Out” and “Doomscroll”. Considered a leading expert on young people, mental health and digital addiction, he’s clinically worked with over 2,000 teens and young adults during the last 20 plus years and has been active in advocating that screen addiction be recognized as a clinical disorder akin to substance addiction.
Dr. Kardaras has also worked with both state legislators and members of Congress to help enact legislation to protect the mental health of children, teens and young adults.
Dr. Kardaras is passionate about treating teens and young adults as they struggle through the worst mental health crisis in our history as they navigate our complex and oftentimes overwhelming new social landscape. Towards that end, he has used his pioneering expertise to develop the most comprehensive protocols to treat the exploding global teen and young mental health crisis. He is excited to bring that expertise to the NY Center of Living in order to make It the premier treatment program for teens and young adults in not just NYC, but as the gold-standard treatment provider for the entire country.