BRONX AND QUEENS, NEW YORK — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's campaign spent $18,725 in campaign cash last year on psychiatric services provided by Dr. Brian Boyle. The expenses were marked as "leadership training and consulting" in Federal Election Commission records.

The payments to Dr. Boyle included $11,550 in March 2025, $2,800 in May 2025, and $4,375 in October 2025. Dr. Boyle is the chief psychiatric officer at Stella, a chain of mental health clinics based in Boston.

Paul Kamenar, Counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center, criticized the expenditures. "While I can understand why AOC would spend $18,000 for a shrink whose specialties include narcissistic personality disorders, using her campaign contributions for what appears to be an expense for personal use violates federal campaign finance laws," Kamenar said.

"While she describes these expenses as 'leadership training,' Dr. Boyle has no expertise in that area, unlike several Democratic campaign consultants," Kamenar said.

Dr. Boyle is Harvard-trained and describes himself as an interventional psychiatrist. He specializes in unorthodox methods for treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, and anxiety.

Ocasio-Cortez has publicly discussed her mental health treatment. In 2021, she said on Latino USA, "Oh yeah, I'm doing therapy."

In 2019, as a freshman congresswoman, she introduced an amendment to allow federal spending on studying the medical potential of psilocybin, ecstasy, and other drugs to treat mental illnesses. She tweeted, "It's well past time we take drug use out of criminal consideration and into medical consideration." The 2019 amendment was rejected, including by her Democratic colleagues, and failed again in 2021. In 2023, she co-sponsored a similar bill that was signed into law.