Department News
John Davis: Pioneer in Psychotropic Medications

For John Davis, MD, 1965 was a pivotal year. It was for psychiatry, too. Psychoanalysis was dominant then, and drug treatment for mental illnesses was frowned upon.
Dr. Davis, who had searched for common elements among drugs that eased or caused mania and depression, proposed a new biogenic theory on the causes of mania and depression - at the time, it was an unheard-of concept.

Dr. Davis has felt a compelling drive to pull together splintered knowledge in the field, test its value and apply it for human benefit. In 1975, he conducted a meta-analysis to see if long-time use of antipsychotics, antimanics and antidepressants prevent relapse.
"For the first time ever, we got the evidence together in one place," Dr. Davis said. The study overwhelmingly supported lifelong use of these drugs to prevent recurrence of episodes. It also led clinicians to prescribe these protective medications with confidence thus avoiding untold calamities and alleviating misery for thousands of mentally ill patients and their families.

Dr. Davis' contributions to psychiatry aren't limited to theory. Early in his career he established a psychiatric research ward in Tennessee. "There was no staff, no lab, no patients, no clinical infrastructure - not even furniture," he recalls. He had the ward up and running in less than two months. In three years, research conducted there yielded more than 100 journal articles.

For 25 years, Dr. Davis directed a research unit in the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute, which was transferred to UIC in 1990. As a consultant to the MacArthur Foundation, he successfully urged the organization to establish a national network of academic centers to study depression. And, with $1 million from the Chicago Community Trust, he launched the Chicago Research Consortium, to pool the research of six psychiatry departments in the Chicago-Milwaukee area.

1981, Dr. Davis became the Gilman Professor of Psychiatry at UIC. In 1996, he won a Telly Award, the educational film equivalent of an Academy Award nomination, for his videotape on the diagnosis of movement disorders.

Dr. Davis' current research efforts focus on developing new drugs to treat psychoses, schizophrenia and depression. He recently spearheaded an effort to link the state mental hospital system with Cook County Jail.

Beyond maximizing immediate applications of new discoveries and collaborative efforts, Dr. Davis conscientiously cultivates future growth in psychiatric knowledge. He takes pride in having mentored dozens of residents and researchers, many of whom have won national and international acclaim in their specialties. "All of them made their careers on projects I started them on," he says. "I gave them good problems to work on."