Max Fink, Champion of Electroconvulsive Therapy, Dies at 102

New York Times

27-06-2025

Max Fink, a psychiatrist and neurologist who advanced the acceptance of electroconvulsive therapy as an option for treating severely depressed patients who do not respond to drugs or psychotherapy, died on June 15 in Westfield, Mass. He was 102.
His death, at a senior living community, was confirmed by his son, Jonathan Fink.
Dr. Fink believed that electroconvulsive therapy was a potent treatment — and shouldn't be considered a last resort — for patients who are suicidal or suffering from delusions.
'Many severely depressed patients are maintained for weeks, for months and even years on antidepressant drugs,' he told a conference on depression in Philadelphia in 1988. 'Are we not unfair when we do this to our patients when ECT remains an active and excellent treatment?'
He first witnessed the use of ECT in 1952, on his first day as a neurology and psychiatry resident at Hillside Hospital (now Zucker Hillside Hospital, a part of Northwell), in Queens. One by one, he watched as five patients — under restraints, with rubber bite-blocks in their mouths and electrodes applied to their temples — received enough electrical current to induce a grand mal seizure.
'Observing a full grand mal seizure in each patient jarred me,' he wrote in 2017 in an unpublished memoir for Stony Brook University in New York, where he worked for many years. But over the next few months, he continued, 'I had learned that ECT effectively reduced suicide thoughts, relieved negativism, aggression, depressed and manic moods. Of the hospital populations, the patients treated with electroshock improved the most.'
Although Dr. Fink was convinced of ECT's positive effects, others in the psychiatric profession weren't.
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