NEW YORK – Dr. Ismene Petrakis spoke with The National Herald about her work, family, Greek heritage, and the new psychiatric ER at VA Connecticut Healthcare System (VACHS) in West Haven, CT. Dr. Petrakis is a Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine and the Director of the Mental Health Service Line at VACHS since July, 2010. She completed residency training at Yale School of Medicine and then a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)-funded addiction psychiatry clinical/research fellowship, and joined the faculty at Yale in 1992. Prior to July 2010, she was the Director of the Substance Abuse Treatment Program of the VACHS since 1996.
Petrakis celebrated the opening of the new psychiatric ER on March 5 along with her colleagues at VACHS and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
When asked if she always wanted to go into psychiatry, she said, “I went to medical school thinking I was going to be a psychiatrist. I don’t know why, it’s not like I had a family member, or knew that much about it, I was always interested in the way people think and then when I did my psychiatry rotation, I really did like it.”
Of her family, Petrakis told TNH that her husband, Michael Sernyak, also a psychiatrist and philhellene, is mostly Irish, with the last name likely from a German or Czechoslovakian ancestor, though the family has been in the United States for many generations. The couple met during their residency, and have two children, son, Alexander Michael who just graduated from Yale, and daughter, Zoe Ekaterini, who graduated from high school and after her gap year will begin college at Yale.
She noted that her father, Leonidas Petrakis, PhD, “was born in Sparta, moved to Athens, then came to the United States when he was 16, he’s in his eighties now, so that was a long time ago, my mother (Lina Petrakis) is Greek-American, born in Boston and grew up in Dorchester, MA.”
Asked if her Greek heritage plays a role in her work, Petrakis said, “my specialty is in substance abuse disorders and so when I was a resident, I liked that patient population, even the ones who had very different lives, especially if you’re using illegal drugs, your life is different from what my life is, you’re spending time procuring drugs from illegal sources, it’s a whole culture, so I think my interest in cultural differences was something that did drive me to the substance abusing population. They live next to you, but they have a different way of interacting, and having grown up in a Greek-American household where not that many people around me were Greek it makes you aware of cultural differences or visiting Greece as a child. In psychiatry, in general, you think about things and how people act and how they think, their behavior and how their upbringing influences them, in that way, I think my Greek heritage influenced me.”
Petrakis grew up mostly in Pittsburgh, where the family moved when she was about five, noting “that was where I went to high school, then I left for college. I came back and went to the University of Pittsburgh for medical school.”
At VACHS for over 20 years, Petrakis said that the opening of the psychiatric ER was a nice event, and “our psychiatric emergency room is an important facility so we can treat people who have acute problems and the space matters because it’s comfortable and it’s recovery-oriented with big enough rooms for people to have some space if they need to go to a room and be quiet if they’re upset or physically sick.
Of her research, she said, “I’m mostly interested in substance abuse so most of my research has been in alcoholism, but, as you know, there is an opioid epidemic, a lot of people using prescription opioids or heroin, so I’ve become interested in that. My latest projects are trying to determine best treatments for people who have opiate use disorders so I’m writing a grant right now on that and I’m also interested in co-morbidity which means people who have a substance abuse disorder and a psychiatric problem like post-traumatic stress disorder or depression and drinking, so that’s been my research focus.”
Petrakis said that there is still stigma attached to mental illness though there has been “some progress in that, because you hear about it in the news, you hear about people trying to take care of people with mental illness, but of course people don’t want to admit that they have a mental disorder, they don’t want to admit that they’re in treatment.”
She added, “people go to the doctor for their high blood pressure, I don’t think they’re embarrassed about it, but if they have a substance abuse problem or a psychiatric problem they’re not always talking about it and it affects people in all walks of life.”
About the future of treating substance use disorders, Petrakis told TNH that “the stigma has gotten a little bit better, and physicians are acknowledging it more, when I first started people didn’t even want to treat substance use disorders, so that’s really changed over the past 15, 20 years and there’s a lot of research looking at medications that might help, behavioral treatments, and then standardizing the care will be important because right now there’s debate about whether it’s going to be covered by insurance, and when it is, there are not that many standards, but I think we’re moving toward making it more standard-based and the insurance companies have to cover certain disorders, I think that will all help.”
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