Neal Adams is a psychiatrist whose career sits at the intersection of clinical care, public mental-health policy, and payer-side strategy — three worlds that rarely come together in one career.
He earned his MD at Northwestern, his MPH at Harvard, and trained in psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center and Stanford, where he was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Adams has also served as past president of The College for Behavioral Health Leadership.
Dr. Adams has been a state-level chief medical officer twice over: first for the New Mexico Division of Mental Health, then, from 2001 to 2004, as Medical Director of the California Department of Mental Health, where he served as the state’s senior advisor on psychiatric services and quality. He went on to spend nearly a decade at the California Institute for Mental Health — ultimately as Deputy Director — leading a multimillion-dollar portfolio of training, consultation, and innovation projects that shaped how California implemented evidence-based practice, recovery-oriented care, and the Mental Health Services Act.
On the payer side, he has served as Associate Medical Director at Optum Health Behavioral Solutions, Medical Director at Magellan Health, and as Medical Director for Behavioral Health at CenCal Health, a Medi-Cal managed care plan serving Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. He has also led inpatient, forensic, and county-based programs across California, Nevada, and New Mexico, including senior psychiatric leadership at Napa State Hospital and Director of Santa Cruz County Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services.
He is the author of Person-Centered Treatment Planning (Elsevier/Academic Press) and has co-authored work in Psychiatric Services, Health Affairs, Schizophrenia Bulletin, and the International Journal of Mental Health. He speaks roughly twenty times a year on topics ranging from quality and financing to workforce, evidence-based practice, and the integration of behavioral health into the broader health-care system.
