Dr. Fink received his M.D. from New York
University College of Medicine in 1945. He served as a medical officer in the US Army, 1946-47 and is
certified as a specialist in neurology (1952), psychoanalysis (1953), and psychiatry (1954). He was
appointed Research Professor of Psychiatry at Washington University in 1962, and then at New York
Medical College (1966 to 1972), and since 1972 at SUNY at Stony Brook, where he is Professor of
Psychiatry and Neurology Emeritus. Since 1997, he has also been on the faculty at AECOM and the
LIJ-Hillside Medical Center.
His studies of ECT began at Hillside Hospital in 1952, and he has
published broadly on predictors of outcome in ECT, effects of seizures on EEG and speech, hypotheses
of the mode of action, and how to achieve an effective treatment. In 1972, with Drs. Seymour Kety
and James McGaugh, he organized an NIMH sponsored conference on the biology of convulsive therapy
which resulted in the volume Psychobiology of Convulsive Therapy (1974). In 1979, he published the
textbook Convulsive Therapy: Theory and Practice (Raven Press, 306 pp.).
In 1984, he established CONVULSIVE THERAPY, a quarterly scientific
journal, published by Raven Press (renamed Journal of ECT). From 1975 to 1978, and again from
1987 to 1990, he was a member of the Task Forces on Electroconvulsive Therapy of the American
Psychiatric Association. In 1995-1996, he chaired the Task Force on Ambulatory ECT of the
Association for Convulsive Therapy. In 1999, he published the trade book ELECTROSHOCK: Restoring
the Mind (Oxford University Press, NY) that was re-issued in paperback in 2002.
He has received many prize awards for his research in ECT and in EEG,
including including the Electroshock Research Award (1956), the A.E. Bennnett award of the Society
of Biological Psychiatry (1958), the Anna Monika Prize award for research into depressive illness
(1979), the Laszlo Meduna Prize of the Hungarian National Institute for Nervous and Mental Disease
(1986), the Gold Medal award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (1988), and Lifetime Achievement
Awards of the Psychiatric Times (1995) and of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (1996).
In psychopharmacology, he established a classification of psychoactive
drugs by digital computer analysis of EEG and has contributed to the effects of narcotic antagonists
and of cannabis.
In 1997 he organized the 4-hospital collaborative study group
known as CORE under grants from NIMH. That group is comparing the merits of continuation
ECT with continuation lithium and nortriptyline in depressed patients who responded to bitemporal
ECT. The study results will appear in the winter of 2005.
In the past few years, Dr. Fink has been interested in catatonia and
the neuroleptic malignant syndrome. In 2003, Catatonia: A Clinician's Guide to Diagnosis and
Treatment, a joint effort with Prof Michael A. Taylor of University of Michigan, was published
by Cambridge University Press. Another effort, Ethics of ECT, with Professor Jan-Otto Ottosson
of the University of Göeborg, Sweden, will be published by Brunner-Routledge Publishing Group
in 2004. He is now working on a book on Melancholia with Dr. Taylor, to be published by Cambridge
University Press in 2005; and concurrently, on a History of Convulsive Therapy with the Toronto
(Canada) Professor of History of Medicine, Edward Shorter and the Reader in Psychopharmacology
David Healy of Wales UK.
Dr. Fink lives in Nissequogue, New York with his wife Martha. |
