Jeffrey L. Anker, MD

Professional Summary

For me, being a psychiatrist has been a calling, in the true sense of the word. I love to help patients gain relief from emotional pain, by genuinely caring about them, helping them to be empowered as a partner with me in our treatment work together, and being devoted to using my clinical skills to help them heal.

I have worked as a psychiatrist for over 50 years, in various settings, including community mental health centers, a Federal Prison for youth, inpatient and partial hospital settings (I was a founder of a psychiatric hospital in Boulder, Colorado, and I established the first partial hospital program in Colorado in the early 80s), and I have had an outpatient practice throughout my career. I had the good fortune to grow up in psychiatry at a time when psychotherapy was the dominant treatment modality, and to experience the evolution of pharmacotherapy as a major tool in our treatment work. Clearly, combined treatment interventions are the most effective for most patients.

Since joining the UB Department of Psychiatry I have worked as the medical director of The Center for Advanced Psychiatry, our department’s outpatient private practice, where faculty members are able to practice what they teach and preach. Our practice has contributed much to upgrading the quality of outpatient psychiatric treatment of adults, adolescents, and children in Buffalo over the past two decades.

I love to teach others and I have taught psychiatry to medical students, psychiatry residents, and allied mental health professionals over the course of my career. I also love to mentor young psychiatrists and psychiatry residents. And my passion for community psychiatry continues, as I have worked with local community mental health leaders to enhance the care and treatment of underrepresented people. And in a corollary way, I have come to appreciate the unique value of embracing spirituality to achieve wellbeing. The bio-psycho-social-spiritual model represents the full human context.

Personal Interests

I love to travel and have traveled throughout the world. It helps me to appreciate how much we humans have in common and to appreciate the beauty of transcending cultural, ethnic, historical, and religious differences. I enjoy the visual arts and the performing arts, and I get a full regular dose of the latter, because my wife is a professional actor. When I was younger, I played different sports and enjoyed watching sporting events. Now that I am older, I still enjoy how entertaining sports can be. And I still value being physically fit and find it increasingly valuable the older I get. I am what is commonly referred to as a foodie and I enjoy every type of cuisine. And last but furthest from least, I have valued the gratifying, hard roles of being a loving husband, father and grandfather.