Rockford Psychiatric Medical Services, S.C.

Dr. William Giakas is a leading clinical expert in the field of psychopharmacology and pharmacotherapy, which requires detailed knowledge of how different psychiatric disorders present, knowledge of physiology and brain chemistry, and how different medications affect the body and interact. 

He also educates other psychiatrists and primary care physicians on appropriate prescribing of psychotropic medications for mental health problems.

To be skilled in psychopharmacology, a physician needs to not only understand the common clinical conditions that a medication treats, but must also posess exhaustive knowledge of the wide range of side effects a medication can cause, in order to monitor properly for even uncommon adverse effects.  

A psychopharmacologist-psychiatrist like Dr. Giakas understands how medications are absorbed into the body, how they are transported and stored, how they enter the brain and bind to special receptors, how they are broken down (metabolized) and excreted from the body, how the drug may interact with other medications, how they effect different age groups who may also have different medical illnesses, and how to effectively combine medications or discontinue medications properly to achieve the best clinical treatment results.

Select Publications in Psychopharmacology

John M. Davis, William J. Giakas, Jie Qu, Pavan Prasad, Stefan Leucht.  Should We Treat Depression with drugs or psychological interventions? A Reply to Ioannidis. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 6:8, 2011

Giakas, WJ, Davis, JM. Improving Patient Compliance: Cisapride in the Treatment of Nausea Due to SSRIs.  Essential Psychopharmacology, 3:3, 2000.

Davis JM, Giakas WJ. Mirtazapine:  The first million patients [Abstract]. In: Scientific Abstracts of the 37th Annual Meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, December 14-18, 1998. Las Croabas, Puerto Rico: 304. 

Giakas, WJ, Davis, JM. Intractable Withdrawal from Venlafaxine Treated with Fluoxetine.  Psychiatric Annals, 27:2, February 1997. 

Giakas, WJ. Risperidone Treatment for a Tourette's Disorder Patient With Comorbid Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder [Letter]. American Journal of Psychiatry, 152:7, July 1995.