became a doctor because I wanted to be useful to other people and to support and, I hoped, guide them in times of crisis and change. I loved being with patients, relaxing into a communion as well as communication with them, allowing myself to make use of my intuition as well as my knowledge to help them. I learned, to my continuing wonder and delight, that together we could form unique solutions to their individual dilemmas.

I began seeing people with emotional problems almost 40 years ago. Not long afterward, I began to explore ways to work with them, biologically as well as psychologically, without the psychotropics — antidepressants, anti–anxiety, and anti–psychotics — drugs that so often produced that so often seem to me dangerous as well as inadequately effective. I began to learn, during my years as a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health (1971–82), yoga, meditation, and Tai Chi; to explore the therapeutic uses of food and herbs; to venture into the vast field of Chinese medicine. I was learning these approaches for and on myself, and then beginning, as I felt more comfortable with them, to use them with my patients in my private practice.

By the late 1970s, while I was still at NIMH, I had a small private practice of psychotherapy and a one evening a week free clinic where I used these “holistic”, or “alternative”, approaches with people with a wide variety of physical problems: kids with earaches, local farmers with bad backs, ex–urbanites with diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Soon I was brining these, my psychotherapy practice and my free clinic, together in a practice that we would now call “integrative.”

Since 1982, when I left NIMH, my practice has grown and contracted with my other activities. Right now, when so much of my time is focused on teaching both professionals and regular people how to become unstuck from anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder, and the ordinary unhappiness and confusion that besets all of us, my practice is quite small.

I see some people with cancer whom I help to develop programs of integrative care, and I do work with small numbers of those who are depressed, anxious, and traumatized. I like to help people who are in a time of crisis and to help them to see that what is most terrifying and troublesome can be their greatest teacher. Right now, I mostly see patients who I’ve know for years and their family members and close friends. I still love all of my meetings with patients, and all the people with whom I work, but since I’ve been from the road so much, working with Israelis and Palestinians and in post–Katrina southern Louisiana, I can rarely see new patients.