Lana Benedek, MD. Psychiatrist Integrative in Los Angeles
Lana Benedek, MD, is an integrative psychiatrist, consultant and teacher who has worked for more than 15 years with adolescents and adults, helping them to attain mental well-being.
Throughout her career, Lana has been keenly interested in empowering individuals to create long-term healing beyond prescription medication and give them the tools to create lasting well-being. To that end, she has practiced mindfulness meditation, yoga, and lifestyle medicine for over 15 years, using it as a foundation for her own life and her approach to treatment. In addition, she approaches her clients from a holistic perspective, assessing mind, body, spirit, community, environment, and genetics in her consultations.
In addition to working privately, she currently facilitates yoga and mindfulness-based therapy groups for individuals with anxiety, depression, and addiction. Additionally, she is on the clinical faculty of the University of Southern California (USC) where she teaches psychiatry trainees about mindfulness and self-care to reduce burnout and stress.
Early in her medical career, Lana became interested in the marriage of medicine and other modalities of healing. During medical school while working on the pediatric ward of Howard Hospital in remote Zimbabwe, Lana became attuned to our society’s dependence on external medical treatments, which led her to begin incorporating mindfulness-based practices and lifestyle medicine into her clinical work.
For much of her life, Lana has been passionate about helping others. While attending medical school in Toronto, Canada, she volunteered to help the city’s homeless population with their addiction issues at one of the first large scale harm reduction programs for alcoholics in North America. Prior to medical school she was employed as an educator at Bellevue Hospital in New York, where she worked to improve access to medical care and health information for the city’s low-income populations.
More recently she completed the first ever year long fellowship in Integrative Psychiatry through the Integrative Psychiatry Institute in Boulder Colorado. This not only included lifestyle medicine and mindfulness interventions but also focused on addressing root causes and implementing non-prescription biological approaches to create long term well-being. She is committed to lifelong learning in the field of mental health and is continuously reading and taking classes to increase her knowledge and expertise.