I was a co-author on one paper about our work at Georgetown and there’s another from the University of Washington that’s come out. I keep hearing interest in this approach from other medical schools and other institutions that want to bring this work in. The interest is there, especially among the students. Every year anywhere from 50 to 70 Georgetown students take this as an elective, two hours a week for 11 weeks. They’re not required to have an elective; they do it on their own time, because they want to do it. We’re finding the same thing at other medical schools.

In North America, at this point 1500 or 1600 people have at least come through the first phase of our professional training program in mind-body medicine. Many, many of them are using this approach in hospitals, clinics and private practices. They’re using it as part of their teaching at universities and graduate schools. So I see it happening, and there’s still a challenge, too, because I think one of the major shifts that has to happen in medicine is a more even balance between treatment and teaching, between what we as professionals do to or for our patients, and what we can help our patients to do for themselves. And so my work—whether in writing a guide about how to move through the journey out of depression, or in my work in training health professionals—is ultimately to put the tools of self-awareness and self-care in the hands of all those people who want to use them. That’s the shift that has to happen in medicine.

And though this change is coming in various places—through the work that I’m doing and that people like Jon Kabat-Zinn [at the University of Massachusetts] and Herbert Benson [at Harvard] and others are doing—it still has a ways to go before it’s regarded as a kind of an equal partner in the health care that all of us need.

At the time of the Kosovo war in the 1990s, you went there to help. Did you go on your own or with institutional backing? And what did you find there and do there?

My colleague Susan Lord and I went on our own. We went to Kosovo because we had started working in Bosnia after the war. We saw that people were certainly interested in mind-body medicine, and in this kind of group model that we were developing. This was about 1996-97. But then, in 1998, we saw the war starting in Kosovo, where the Serbian army, police and paramilitaries were fighting against the Albanian rebels. The Albanians made up 90 to 95 percent of the population and they were under the thumb of the Serbian government. They wanted freedom. They didn’t want to be treated as second-class citizens. So we saw the war starting up and we wanted to be there because we wanted to do whatever we could, first of all, to be on the side of peaceful reconciliation in which the Albanians had their own territory. But secondly, we wanted to be there at the beginning to help people who were being traumatized by the war and to help train the local health, mental health and educational professionals who were working with them.

What we had seen in Bosnia is that if you wait until after the war is over, patterns of dysfunction become fixed in peoples’ bodies and minds. Their blood pressure goes up, pain syndromes are profound, large numbers of people become depressed, there is a lot of abuse of alcohol and a lot of abuse of women and children. We felt that if we could begin to help people in Kosovo deal with this stress now, during the war, rather than waiting until after the war, maybe we could make a long-term difference in the health of this population.