James Samuel Gordon

While at NIMH, he developed the first national program for runaway and homeless youth, edited the first comprehensive studies of alternative and holistic medicine, directed the Special Study on Alternative Services for President Carter’s Commission on Mental Health, and created a nationwide preceptorship program for medical students.

He has been Georgetown Medical School’s director of the program of mind-body studies and clinical professor in the departments of psychiatry and family medicine since 1980.

[2] In 2008, CMBM won a research award from the U.S. Department of Defense to study the mind-body approach with veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and their families.

[3] Gordon also was appointed to chair the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy (WHCCAMP) from 2000 to 2002 by President Clinton.

[citation needed] In his seven-stage program outlined in Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression, which he describes as "adapted from mythologist Joseph Campbell's groundbreaking studies of the world's mythic heroes and heroines",[5] Gordon explains the useful, mood-healing benefits of food and nutritional supplements; movement, exercise, and dance as well as that of psychotherapy, meditation, guided imagery, spiritual practice, and prayer.