C. Ray Lake, MD, PhD is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, The University of Kansas Health System, Kansas City, KS.
Dr. Lake graduated from Tulane University, New Orleans, LA in 1965. He received an MS in Insect Physiology, also from Tulane, in 1966. He graduated from Duke University, School of Medicine and Duke Graduate School (Department of Physiology and Pharmacology), Durham, NC, in 1971 and 1972. He studied at Oxford University with Professor Peter Brunet, PhD and at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, with Professor Mike Besser, MD. His residency in Psychiatry was completed at Duke and at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). As a research associate and staff psychiatrist at the NIMH, Laboratory of Clinical Sciences, he worked under Irv Kopin and alongside Mike Ziegler, Mike Ebert, Fred Goodwin, Dennis Murphy, Richard Wyatt, Julie Axelrod, and Bob Post. In 1979 he moved across the pike to takea professorship of Psychiatry and Pharmacology at the then-new Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS), School of Medicine. He secured two NIH RO1’s continuing his research on the regulation of the sympathetic nervous system in patients with neuropsychiatric and cardiovascular disorders.
In 1993 he accepted the chairmanship of Psychiatry at the University of Kansas School of Medicine and remained chair for three years after which he continued on the full-time faculty until his recent partial retirement. As Professor Emeritus he continues to publish, teach about Mood Disorders and follow his long-term patients. He has over 250 publications including two recent 400-plus page textbooks. He has achieved life-fellowship status in the American Psychiatric Association and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. His current interests are the misdiagnosis of Schizophrenia, a more effective strategy for teachingPsychiatry in medical schools, and violence among Mood-Disordered individuals. He believes Bipolar clients are underserved and that psychotherapists are in a good position to undertake their overall management once psychotherapy training departments educate their students about Bipolar. His most recent single-authored books are titled Schizophrenia is a Misdiagnosis published by Springer in 2012, Bipolar, published by Elsevier in 2021, and Bipolar for Psychotherapists and their Clients, to be published by Nature, 2023.