Satel earned a Bachelor's degree from Cornell University, a Master's degree from the University of Chicago and an MD degree from Brown University. She completed her residency in psychiatry at Yale University between 1988 and 1993. In 1993 and 1994, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow with the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

In her book P.C. M.D., Satel critiques what she sees as the burgeoning phenomenon of 'politically correct' (PC) medicine, which seeks to address what its proponents view as social oppression by reorganizing the distribution of public health resources. She argues that incorporating social justice into the mission of medicine diverts attention and resources from the effort to prevent and combat disease for everyone. Satel considers the idea of social determination of illness as "one of the most pernicious themes in PC medicine," and sees 'psychiatric survivor' information centers as promoting the work of anti-psychiatry groups. She is considered a political conservative.

In a June 2004 meeting of the National Advisory Council for the Center for Mental Health Services, Satel called for a vast increase in the amount of forced outpatient medical treatment of psychiatric patients, echoing views earlier stated in her Drug Treatment, The Case for Coercion.