Hagop S. Akiskal

Who is Hagop S. Akiskal?

Hagop Souren Akiskal is an Armenian-American psychiatrist best known for his research on temperament and bipolar disorder. Born in Lebanon to Armenian parents, he received his M.D. from the American University of Beirut in 1969. He completed his residency training in psychiatry at University of Wisconsin–Madison, and then worked for several years as a clinician and mood disorders researcher at the University of Tennessee, Memphis. He was senior science advisor at NIMH from 1990–1994, before moving to the University of California, San Diego, where he is currently professor of psychiatry. Today's leading conceptual thinker in the area of bipolar subtyping, Akiskal is a fastidious researcher and an astute clinical observer. He is a devotee of Emil Kraepelin; he believes that the nosologic pendulum is gradually swinging back towards Kraepelin's original unitary concept of the bipolar spectrum of mood disorders.

Professor Akiskal rose to prominence with his integrative theory of depression. Subsequently he established chronic depressions as treatable mood disorders. His research on cyclothymia paved the way for understanding the childhood antecedents of bipolarity, and helped in the worldwide renaissance of the temperament field. His focus on subthreshold mood disorders enlarged the boundaries of bipolar disorders. He has received the Gold Medal for Pioneer Research, the German Anna Monika Prize for Depression, the NARSAD Prize for Affective Disorders, the 2002 Jean Delay Prize for international collaborative research, as well as the French Jules Baillarger and the Italian Aretaeus Prizes for his research on the bipolar spectrum.