Mental healthcare: In conversation with Lloyd Sederer

Lloyd I Sederer, MD, is a psychiatrist, public health doctor, and non-fiction writer.

He is an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University School of Public Health. He has served as CMO/EVP of McLean Hospital, a Harvard teaching hospital; Mental Health Commissioner of NYC (in the Bloomberg administration); and CMO of the NYS Office of Mental Health, the nation’s largest state MH Agency.

Dr. Sederer has led large scale mental health disaster responses for New York City and New York State, including 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy.

He was the 2019 recipient of the Doctor of the Year award from The National Council on Behavioral Health; a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar in Residence; and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. His professional association (APA) named him Psychiatric Administer of the Year and (in a different year) he received the APA’s award for Excellence in Teaching Residents.

He has published 13 books, the first seven for medical professionals (two with multiple editions) and, more recently, six for a general audience. He has published ~500 articles for print and online publications, including the NYT, the WSJ, Scientific American, Lancet, Medscape, The Atlantic, The Tennessean, Commonweal, and US News and World Report (where he wrote an Opinion column). He was Medical Editor for Mental Health at the HuffPost, where >100 of his articles, audios and videos appeared. He currently is a Contributing Writer for Psychology Today (>100 articles), Psychiatric Times, and The NY Journal of Books.

His next book (January 2024) is a healthcare story, a business story, and a leadership story. It is about the collision of traditional medicine with our new era of the corporatization of medicine, using as a case example a storied Harvard Hospital.

Dr. Sederer lives in Concord, NH, with his wife and dog.