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INFORMATION FOR

Ariadna Forray, MD

she/her/hers
Associate Professor of Psychiatry
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Additional Titles

Chief, Psychological Medicine Section, Psychiatry

Director, Center for Wellbeing of Women and Mothers, Psychiatry

Yale Medical Director, ACCESS Mental Health for Moms, CT Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services

Education

MD
Harvard Medical School


BA
Bryn Mawr College, Biology - Neuroscience


Training

Resident
Yale School of Medicine


Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Psychiatry
Yale School of Medicine


About

Titles

Associate Professor of Psychiatry

Chief, Psychological Medicine Section, Psychiatry; Director, Center for Wellbeing of Women and Mothers, Psychiatry

Positions outside Yale

Yale Medical Director, ACCESS Mental Health for Moms, CT Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services

Biography

Dr. Ariadna Forray received her B.A. in biology and neuroscience from Bryn Mawr and her M.D. from Harvard. She completed her residency training in psychiatry at Yale and has been a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry since then. She is the Director of the Center for Wellness of Women and Mothers, a reproductive psychiatry research program. As a principal investigator and co-investigator on numerous federally funded grants, she has developed and implemented addiction treatment interventions for perinatal patients.

Clinically, Dr. Forray is a consultation-liaison psychiatrist at Yale New Haven Hospital, where she is the Section Chief of Psychological Medicine, which consists of traditional and proactive psychiatric consult services on medical and surgical inpatient units and over 15 integrated psychiatry and behavioral health programs in diverse medical and surgical outpatient settings. She is also the Yale Director for the ACCESS Mental Health for Moms program in Connecticut, which provides psychiatric expertise and consultation to medical providers treating perinatal women presenting with mental health or substance use concerns.

Appointments

  • Psychiatry

    Associate Professor on Term
    Primary

Other Departments & Organizations

Education & Training

Resident
Yale School of Medicine
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Psychiatry
Yale School of Medicine
Intern
Yale-New Haven Hospital
MD
Harvard Medical School
BA
Bryn Mawr College, Biology - Neuroscience

Research

Overview

The overarching goal of Dr. Forray’s research is to address our knowledge gap and lack of treatments for substance use and psychiatric disorders in the perinatal period. Her early work focused on perinatal mental health and specifically examined the different manifestations and impact of anxiety disorders in pregnancy. She explored the prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in pregnant women with prior pregnancy complications and the effect of pregnancy, childbirth, and menstruation on the onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Her exploration of the role of reproductive hormones in the presentation of psychiatric disorders led to her current research developing novel interventions for the treatment of substance use disorders in pregnancy and postpartum.

She published the first study to examine pregnancy-related abstinence and postpartum relapse into substance use prospectively. As a principal investigator (PI) and co-investigator on several federally funded grants, she has developed and implemented addiction and mental health treatment interventions. Some of her work includes a National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA)-funded study on the use of progesterone as a postpartum smoking relapse prevention treatment, a National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD)-funded research testing an innovative technique using smartphones to administer attentional bias modification for smoking-related cues as a postpartum relapse prevention intervention for Black and Hispanic perinatal women, and a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI)-funded clustered randomized trial evaluating the effectiveness of two models for providing support to obstetricians caring for pregnant and postpartum women with an opioid use disorder across 12 sites in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Medical Research Interests

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; Depression, Postpartum; Motivational Interviewing; Postpartum Period; Substance-Related Disorders; Tobacco Use Disorder

Research at a Glance

Research Interests

Research topics Ariadna Forray is interested in exploring.

Publications

2024

2023

2022

See All Publications

Clinical Trials

Current Trials

Academic Achievements & Community Involvement

  • activity

    Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice

    Journal ServiceAssociate Editor
  • honor

    Minority Student Summer Fellowship

    National AwardAmerican Psychiatric Association

Clinical Care

Overview

Ariadna Forray, MD, is a psychiatrist who treats medical and surgical patients at Yale New Haven Hospital who have psychiatric needs. She specializes in psychiatric and substance-use disorders in unique and complex patient populations that include pregnant and postpartum women, and adults living with sickle cell disease.

One of the few psychiatrists in the U.S. with expertise in mental health issues in patients with sickle cell disease, Dr. Forray was recruited in 2012 as the psychiatry director of a newly developed, interdisciplinary Yale Medicine Adult Sickle Cell Program, which successfully transitioned care from high-cost inpatient and emergency care to integrated outpatient services, and led to improved care and services.

Dr. Forray also has a keen interest in mental health in women across the reproductive lifespan, which she says was inspired by an experience during her residency, when a patient was transferred to the ICU following an intentional overdose. “This was a 30-year-old postpartum woman, who in the two months following the birth of her first child had attempted suicide twice and failed three different medication trials with seven different medications,” Dr. Forray says. “When I met her, I was struck by how much she was suffering—she was restless, she couldn’t sleep, she was extremely anxious, and ruminated over her baby’s well-being to a degree that was unhealthy.” The case inspired her to learn more about why only some postpartum women develop mental health issues, what role hormones might play, and how such struggles might impact a newborn infant. “It was this curiosity combined with the desire to help women during this vulnerable period of their life that defined my path in psychiatry,” she says.

In addition to her other roles, Dr. Forray is the director of the Center for Well-being of Women and Mothers, a reproductive psychiatry research program at Yale, where she studies novel treatments for perinatal substance use. She is currently working on a study that is evaluating two models to help obstetrical providers deliver substance-use treatment to pregnant women with an opioid use disorder across 12 sites in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Clinical Specialties

Psychiatry; Perinatal Psychiatry; Addiction Medicine

Fact Sheets

Board Certifications

  • Addiction Medicine (Preventive Medicine)

    Certification Organization
    AB of Preventive Medicine
    Original Certification Date
    2019

  • Psychiatry

    Certification Organization
    AB of Psychiatry & Neurology
    Original Certification Date
    2010

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