Judith L. Landau, MD, DPM, LMFT, CFLE, CIP, CAI, CRS, Founder and President of Linking Human Systems, LLC, LINC Foundation, and ARISE Network, and Co-Founder of the International Recovery Institute, is a child, family, and community neuropsychiatrist. Chair of the Division of Marriage and Family Therapy and former professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of Rochester, she has devoted her career to developing Evidence-Based, Best Practice collaborative family and community resilience models. She is a former faculty member of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and Senior Consultant to the International Trauma Studies Program at NYU and Columbia. Dr. Landau draws upon 50+ years of research and experience aimed at facilitating long-term healing for individuals, families, and communities dealing with chronic, relapsing behavioral, mental, and physical health issues and addiction. (www.linkinghumansystems.com).
Dr. Landau enjoys overcoming challenging patient, family, business, forensic and community issues, and unraveling complex systems. A founder of family therapy, her passion is overcoming racial injustice and improving the living situations of disadvantaged communities. As a child, growing up before and during the oppression and violence of Apartheid, she was enveloped in the closeness of her community of family and non-blood family. This was her first experience of the protective nature of relational resilience. Helping people realize their inherent resilience and the importance of connectedness to family and culture as protection from trauma became the heart of her life’s mission.
Her parents’ friends and colleagues were ethnically, racially and culturally mixed. Many of them were violently separated with the onslaught of Apartheid and miscegeny laws. During the forced absence of many parents, Judith and her friends always felt the closeness and comfort of belonging in a larger, supportive community. At the age of 6, she witnessed her first racially motivated murders. Seeing secret meetings about the overthrow of the government drove her to become active in the anti-apartheid movement. (Her photograph is in the Cape Town anti-Apartheid museum.) She and a colleague were the first to integrate “black and white” wards in Groote Schuur Hospital (famous for the first heart transplant). This was the beginning of integrated clinical services. They also began the equalization of salaries across racial boundaries. While President of the South African Psychiatric Association, she served as the primary consultant to the Judiciary on issues of domestic violence. Working as a District Surgeon, she was responsible for all inner city, prison and police forensic issues and violence. She and the judges collaborated in the process of including families on both sides of the case to understand the background and context of the crime. This later developed into the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Based on her relational resilience research, Dr. Landau with University of Rochester faculty, developed the Evidence-Based, Best-Practice Transitional Family Therapy (TFT). This was the first integrative model of family therapy. Based on TFT, they developed protocols at individual, family, and community level. These include LINC Community Resilience, ARISE Comprehensive Care with Invitational Intervention (a method for engaging and treating addicted individuals and their families), and LIFE (applied to reducing intimate partner violence, STDs/HIV/AIDS, and addiction in inner city and minority women). Dr. Landau took early retirement to apply these methods in the “real world.” She has conducted numerous country and state-wide community interventions, executive and business interventions, and several thousand individual and family interventions.
Author and co-author of over 200 peer-reviewed publications and books, she has taught in more than 90 countries, and trained several thousand therapists, interventionists and trainers. Her ground-breaking book, AIDS, Health and Mental Health, won the international Choice Library award. Dr. Landau has consulted to and been principal investigator on research conducted through WHO, NIDA, NIAAA, SAMHSA, CDC & P and EAR. Dr. Landau has consulted to the UN and WHO (most recently to the Public Health section about communities dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic).
Dr. Landau has served as consultant to national and international universities, and international governments including Argentina, South Africa, Hong Kong, Hungary, Brazil, Taiwan, countries in former Yugoslavia (most recently Kosovo), and to a United States Congressional Committee on prevention of consequences of mass disaster. She currently serves as a consultant to the WHO Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Geneva and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation Section (PTRS). Vienna. She is a frequent consultant to treatment centers, colleagues, clients, families, and family businesses around the world.
A Senior Fulbright Visiting Scholar, and Fellow of Orthopsychiatry Association, AAMFT and NCFR, she is the recipient of awards for AAMFT’s Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Marriage and Family Therapy, AFTA’s Innovative Contribution to Family Therapy, The Winter Leadership Symposium’s Lifetime Achievement award, Association of Intervention Specialists, Interventionist of the year, 2023, Harmony Foundation’s Trailblazer award. She is past president of the International Family Therapy Association (IFTA) and has served on numerous editorial boards, and national and international association boards. She has been listed in Marquis Who’s Who in the World and holds the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. Aside from all this, Judith is an “Isangoma” or traditional African healer and a member of 4 Winds Indigenous Healers, an organization committed to bridging traditional wisdom and western science. And, if you haven’t seen it yet, do watch her TEDX talk, Family Stories, Secrets and Survival about family resilience, trauma, addiction, and mental health.