Ayala Danzig, MD is a clinical and forensic psychiatrist and a writer of essay, poetry and song in New Haven, CT. She treats veterans with serious psychiatric illness with a focus on recovery-oriented, interdisciplinary and community-based care. In her forensic practice, Ayala specializes in evaluations for competency to stand trial and for pleas for not guilty by reason of insanity. She is on the faculty at Yale University School of Medicine where she teaches medical students, psychiatry residents and forensic psychiatry fellows.
Ayala has a B.A. from Thomas Edison State College, an M.S.W. from New York University and an M.D. from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Ayala completed her internship at New York University and her remaining three years of general psychiatry residency at Yale University. She then completed a fellowship in Law and Psychiatry at Yale University. She is the recipient of numerous awards for clinical excellence, humanism and teaching.
Ayala explores the complex and messy human side of practicing medicine in her writing and has had work published in the Boston Globe Magazine, Nautilus Magazine, Murmur and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
Ayala takes the maxim 'physician heal thyself' seriously. She hasn't yet fully figured out how to do that, but she turns to writing, music, and cats hoping to find the answer.