Program on Integrative Mental Health Care

The Institute's Program on Integrative Mental Health Care, under the direction of James Lake, MD, is pursuing and planning a variety of projects, including:

- developing expert software for integrative mental health planning;

- developing the conceptual base and logistical details for a future Center for research in CAM pertaining to mental health;

- building on current efforts to create a presence within the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to rigorously explore CAM/integrative approaches with the goal of influencing APA policy about uses of CAM/integrative approaches; and

- funding a major interdisciplinary conference on CAM/integration in mental health care.

As part of its overall focus on integrative and energy medicine, the Institute is committed to exploration of facilitating the development of integrative medicine in psychiatry, as well as ensuring that care is "clinically appropriate, ethically responsible, and legally defensible." (Cohen MH. Legal Issues in Integrative Medicine. Washington, D.C.: NAF Press; 2005).

While some psychiatrists currently are limiting research to specific modalities such certain dietary supplements for treatment of depression, still broader work involves the interface between spirituality, "frontier medicine" or "biofield therapeutics" (as denoted by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health), mental health care, and consciousness. Increasingly, scholars and scientists are describing a "bio-psychosocial-spiritual framework underlying health and disease," linking mental health care and spirituality within the complementary medicine context.

Relating these topics to law and regulation, Michael H. Cohen recently published Healing at the borderland of medicine and religion: regulating potential abuse of authority by spiritual healers. 18:2 J Law & Relig 2004;373-426. His book, Healing at the Borderland of Medicine and Religion, is currently under consideration by an academic press. Michael H. Cohen recently met with leaders at University of Michigan Integrative Medicine, which has an interdisciplinary faculty scholars program exploring similar topics, such as "Integrative Approaches to Mental Health and Spiritual Healing."

About James Lake, MD

Dr Lake completed his M.D. at the University of California, Irvine in 1992, and returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue residency training in psychiatry at Stanford University Hospital. During residency his chief interests included cultural psychiatry, non-Western treatments of psychiatric disorders; the philosophy of psychiatry; and consciousness studies. Currently, his principle interests include evidence-based uses of herbs and other natural products as treatments of psychiatric disorders; Chinese medical psychiatry; developing algorithms for evidence-based integrative treatment-planning in psychiatry; and uses of emerging modalities including EEG biofeedback and virtual reality exposure therapy in the treatment of anxiety disorders.

He has been an attending physician at the Complementary Medicine Clinic, Stanford University Hospital, and currently has a small private practice in Pacific Grove, where he combines psychotherapy and evidence-based Western and complementary treatments for the spectrum of psychiatric disorders. Dr. Lake is a co-author, with Bob Flaws, of Chinese Medical Psychiatry: A Clinical Manual, and numerous articles and book chapters on complementary medicine in psychiatry.