Fricchione, Gregory

(Gregory Lewis Fricchione)

PERSONAL: Male. Education: New York University School of Medicine, M.D.

ADDRESSES: Home—Boston, MA. Office—Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit St., Boston, MA, 02114. E-mail—gfricchione@partners.org.

CAREER: New York University—Bellevue Hospital Center, New York, NY, former resident and chief resident in psychiatry; Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, fellow in consultation psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine and associate chief of psychiatry; Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA, associate professor of psychiatry, 1983–; director of Carter Center Mental Health Program, 2000–02; Mind-Body Medical Institute, Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, former director of research.

WRITINGS:

(With Windsor Ting) The Heart-Mind Connection: How Emotions Contribute to Heart Disease and What to Do about It, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to medical journals.

SIDELIGHTS: The Heart-Mind Connection: How Emotions Contribute to Heart Disease and What to Do about It is the joint effort of medical psychiatrist Gregory Fricchione and cardiothoracic surgeon Windsor Ting. Fricchione has worked extensively with psychiatric patients suffering from medical and neurological ailments, and he has helped institute the use of Lorazepam as a first-line treatment for catatonia. He has also taught at a number of medical schools, including Harvard University Medical School. Ting specializes in minimally invasive heart surgery and is especially interested in ensuring that consumers have access to proper health services. Ting has written numerous scholarly articles for medical journals on both heart disease and its treatments. Together, these doctors have researched the connection between mind and body, focusing on how the psyche can effect the onset and treatment of heart disease in particular. Although mental and emotional problems have long been considered to result from heart disease, Fricchione and Ting suggest that the reverse is also the case, and that prolonged depression, anger, social isolation, or chronic stress can have an adverse effect on the heart's condition. Howard Fuller noted in Library Journal that The Heart-Mind Connection is a "clearly written and solidly researched guide."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Library Journal, October 15, 2005, Howard Fuller, review of The Heart-Mind Connection: How Emotions Contribute to Heart Disease and What to Do about It, p. 75.

Publishers Weekly, October 17, 2005, review of The Heart-Mind Connection, p. 64.

ONLINE

Massachusetts General Hospital, Department of Psychiatry Web site, http://www.mgh.harvard.edu/ (March 7, 2006), author biography.

Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving Web site, http://rci.gsw.edu/ (March 7, 2006), information on author.