Radwan Haykal, MD, has a brother, Marwan, who is stuck in Aleppo, the once vibrant city in Syria that is now in ruins as a result of the civil war there.
Haykal describes his hometown as “the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world,” but also “the worst place you can be in, the most dangerous city in the world, at least until the recent truce.” The doctor, who is president of the medical staff at Lakeside Behavioral Health System, is greatly worried about Marwan.
At the same time, Haykal is greatly pleased to be a U.S. citizen and a resident of Memphis going on 42 years now. He has been at Lakeside since 1983 and, since 2007, is the director of its Bipolar Spectrum Program.
When he came to Memphis in 1975, he found the city was a perfect fit for him.
“It’s very interesting that Memphis and Aleppo have parallels,” he said. “Both of them are cotton cities. Both of them are agricultural and have conservative values. So there is a big contingency of Aleppo people in Memphis.”
It was in Memphis that he met his wife, Suzanne, and where they have raised their two sons, Faris and Zane.
“I have stayed because I liked the community,” he said. “I was embraced by the city. I have a sense of belonging here. I don’t believe in moving from one spot to another. Although my wife is from Memphis, she was more eager to leave Memphis than I was.”
Haykal, a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a past president of the Tennessee Psychiatric Association, has made an impact here.
“I introduced light therapy to Memphis for patients with seasonal affective disorder,” he said. “I focus on natural therapies. In the Bipolar Spectrum Program, we teach patients about their disease and involve families in the treatment. We try to create a partnership between the patient, family and doctor so there will be a free exchange of ideas and information.”
Haykal teaches students and residents and is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and a professional advisor since 1986 to the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance. He is cautiously optimistic about the work being done to treat bipolar disorders.
While genomic studies may be promising, he said, “until this information gets more crystallized, I believe our progress has not been as fast as we want it to be, because we don’t have a biological test that’s affirmative, that will tell you who is bipolar and who is not. We have to rely on our clinical information.”
He mentioned lurasidone, an anti-psychotic drug, and lamotrigine, a mood stabilizer, as medications that are relatively new. “We stumbled on them kind of by coincidence,” he said. “They were meant for other diseases and ended up being very helpful for bipolar illness.”
Having said that, Haykal cites drugs and alcohol addiction as impediments to successful treatment.
“In bipolar illness,” he said, “50 percent of patients use drugs and alcohol, and unless we address this area of addiction, it will be very difficult for us to arrive at a good treatment for the patient. Even patients who take marijuana on a regular basis are not going to respond to treatment as expected.”
Looking back, Haykal might not have become a psychiatrist if he had listened to his family. He grew up in Aleppo and then went to college and medical school at the American University of Beirut. His father had been CEO of one of Syria’s largest textile companies, but when the Baath Party took power, it seized the company and the family fled to Lebanon.
“He went from way up to almost nothing,” Haykal said. “He was broken.”
As a boy, Haykal had health problems, “and every time I went to the doctor, I wanted to be a doctor,” he said. His Armenian family doctor, he said, was “what you want to see in a doctor in terms of the human touch.”
Haykal first thought about endocrinology or internal medicine, but he chose psychiatry “because it was a natural choice for me. It fits my temperament and my way of thinking. In high school I was interested in literature and the liberal arts and less interested in biology.
“I was better in analytical thinking. I avoided the surgical specialties because I couldn’t stomach them. And I did not have the dexterity and the confidence.”
His family was, in a word, disappointed.
“They said ‘are you going to waste your time on psychiatry after all these years of study?’ But I didn’t listen to that,” he said. “I followed my passion.”
He had honed his psychiatric skills early.
“My parents, it was a strange marriage and I was a go-between,” he said, “reconciling them, working agreements and negotiating between them. They fought a lot. They were not well-matched, I should say. That has helped me, equipped me.
“I remember with my brother, we used to sit down and analyze characters in the family, and believe me, we had characters.”
Recalling his years at the American University of Beirut, Haykal said, “I’m not bragging, but you might consider it the Harvard of the Middle East, especially at that time before the civil war in Lebanon. It was a shining light, a place of diversity and religious tolerance, and thinkers and movers and shakers were coming out of the American University of Beirut.”
His formative years in psychiatry were greatly influenced by two Armenian teachers who were AUB graduates: Drs. Vahe Puzantian and Hagop Akiskal. Puzantian taught Haykal in medical school and then at UT after Puzantian escaped the war in Lebanon. Akiskal was a clinician and researcher at UT and is now a professor of psychiatry at the University of California-San Diego.
Coming to Memphis and staying for four decades, Haykal said, "allowed me to treat, in one instance, four generations in one single family. This longitudinal view of mood disorders was a key element of my research on chronic depressions and bipolar disorders.”
RELATED LINKS:
Lakeside Behavioral Health System, www.lakesidebhs.com; American University of Beirut, www.aub.edu.lb; University of Tennessee Health Science Center, www.uthsc.edu; Tennessee Psychiatric Association, www.tnpsychiatricassoc.org; American Psychiatric Association, www.psychiatry.org
