About

Dr. James Rao has been working in the field of mental health since 1998. He provides counseling to adults and adolescents through individual, couples and family psychotherapy, and is able to draw on extensive experience in a variety of settings and with many different populations. His experience includes four years of training in adolescent and family mental health treatment at The Mount Sinai Hospital Adolescent Health Center in New York City. He spent 8 years counseling chronically ill patients (and their families) as they coped with chronic kidney and liver disease at a hospital organ transplant center. In this capacity he was significantly involved in program development. He has provided a good deal of supervision to those seeking to enter the mental health field. Dr. Rao’s experience has included providing therapy to graduate and undergraduate students from a number of different Universities. In an outpatient mental health setting he has provided crisis intervention to adult, children, and adolescent families in short, moderate and long- term frameworks as well as treating the family as a whole when clinically indicated.
Problems Treated
He has experience in helping people with depression, anxiety, phobias, social discomfort, low self-esteem, OCD, ADHD, trauma, grief, anger control, difficulty adjusting to life circumstances, coping with chronic illness, complicated family dynamics, insomnia/disrupted sleep and substance use. Dr. Rao has run anger management groups in the past and is also very familiar with the dynamics involved in substance abuse and the treatment of addictive disorders.
Specialized Trainings/Certifications
Dr. Rao has also been certified in Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Insomnia through The University of Massachusetts Medical School. He has been trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. He has applied CBT strategies and techniques to the treatment of trauma. He has also received certification as a Clinical Transplant Social Worker. He has been published in a respected medical journal. When in school Dr. Rao received the Bruce Weinberg Memorial Award for outstanding work in counseling psychology.