mental health

June 26, 2020

COVID-19’s Coming Mental Health Pandemic? Interview on Expansive Strategies with Integrative Psychiatrist James Lake, MD

In a recent conference organized out of Prague and moved online, a presenter from the United Kingdom shared a list of concerns that seemed to go on forever of all that is frightening people these days. Foremost on his list were Covid19, what seem to many like authoritarian governmental measures to control its spread, uncertainty about the economy, and the questionable competence of world leaders in the face of a mounting global crisis. In the United States, these are compounded by unrest over police brutality against Black people forcing many to re-examine the legacy of 400 years of what historians call our “peculiar institution” of slavery. Author and clinician James Lake MD is an integrative psychiatrist who has witnessed the effects of this “perfect storm” close up. For Psychiatry Times, Lake authored a column on what he calls A Mental Health Pandemic: The Second Wave of COVID-19. He urged a re-think of typical mental health responses to include integrative solutions in his “Call for a National Strategy.” I reached Lake to explore what has steered his vision to make such dire predictions, and to explore how integrative methods might best figure into solutions.