Medicine Without Margins

During his time as a young Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, Dr. Glen Davis (M.D. ’04) often witnessed families experiencing harrowing life challenges. Perhaps none moved him as profoundly as the case of a woman with untreated psychosis who was restrained in her family’s hut while her relatives tried to enlist help to get her the medical attention she needed.

That experience in Burkina Faso, says Dr. Davis, inspired a blueprint for his career, guiding the kind of psychiatrist — and leader — he would become. As chief medical officer of the Institute for Community Living (ICL) since 2023, he oversees clinical care for about 14,000 New Yorkers each year who live with severe mental illness, substance use disorders, developmental disabilities, housing instability or a combination of these challenges. More than 1,400 ICL employees deliver 140 programs across 50 locations in the city’s five boroughs, helping the most vulnerable stay housed and connected to care.

A self-described “late bloomer physician” who began his studies at Weill Cornell Medical College at age 30, Dr. Davis’s work at ICL bridges a bevy of early experiences that deepened his interest in psychiatry, including a medical school elective at a psychiatric hospital in Botswana and research for a public health class that focused on Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) — a mobile treatment model for people with severe mental illness. “Fast-forward 20 years, and I’m the CMO of an agency where we operate seven ACT teams and six intensive mobile treatment teams,” he says. “I see it as a full-circle moment.”

Before his current role, Dr. Davis spent 10 years at the Center for Urban Community Services, a large provider of integrated programs that link housing, health and social services for New York City’s unhoused and other at-risk people.

Key to Dr. Davis’s work — and ICL’s approach — is the insistence on meeting people where they are, both literally and figuratively. Delivering psychiatric care outside of the traditional healthcare system can run the gamut from checking up on patients who didn’t show for medical appointments to administering long-acting injectable antipsychotic medications in shelters, supportive housing, hospitals, correctional institutions and on the street. Regardless of the setting, Dr. Davis measures success by the quality of care and connection with patients.

“What I do is the Peace Corps of psychiatry, if you will, because it’s just such a nontraditional approach in terms of where we go and how we provide services,” Dr. Davis says. “As a psychiatrist in the public sector, I see my role as providing medical and psychiatric support while also focusing on health-related social needs that help people live full and meaningful lives.

“The relationship is the treatment,” he says.