Max Fink

Maximilian Fink (January 16, 1923 – June 15, 2025) was an American neurologist and psychiatrist best known for his work on electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). In 1985, Fink founded the journal Convulsive Therapy, which is now called The Journal of ECT. His early work also included studies on the effect of psychoactive drugs on brain electrical activity; his later work included books about the syndromes of catatonia and melancholia, published in the 2010s.

Background Fink was born in Vienna, Austria, on January 16, 1923. His parents were a physician and a social worker.

He married Martha Pearl Gross, Barnard College, class of 1949.

Residency training in neurology and psychiatry from 1948 to 1954 was at New York's Montefiore, Bellevue, and Hillside Hospitals. He received training in electroencephalography at Mount Sinai Hospital under a fellowship of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Concurrently he attended the William Alanson White Institute of Psychoanalysis, receiving the Certificate for Physicians in 1953. He was board certified in neurology in 1952 and psychiatry in 1954.

Academic positions, research and awards Fink was appointed research professor of psychiatry at Washington University in 1962, at New York Medical College in 1966 and professor of psychiatry and neurology at State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1972. through to statements that organic mental syndrome is seen in all patients following ECT but is usually transient and finally to the position that ECT-induced memory loss is a hysterical symptom with parallels to the Camelford water pollution incident. A specific interest compared ECT to seizures induced by flurothyl.

A good part of his academic research was in the effects of psychoactive drugs on the electroencephalogram (see Pharmaco-electroencephalography).

His most recent interest was in the syndromes of catatonia and of melancholia.

In 1985, Fink founded the journal Convulsive Therapy (now called The Journal of ECT). and the C. Charles Burlingame Award and Lecture, Institute for Living, CT (2019).

Retirement In 1997, Fink moved to the Long Island Jewish Hillside Hospital to organize a government supported 4-hospital collaborative program examining continuation treatments in patients with major depression after successful ECT. The study group under the acronym "CORE"—Consortium on Research in ECT—has published on the merits of continuation ECT and continuation medication to sustain remission.

As professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurology at SUNY at Stony Brook and on the faculty at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the LIJ-Hillside Medical Center, a book on the history of ECT by Edward Shorter and David Healy.