Frank John Ninivaggi - Learned Mindfulness Physician Engagement and M.D. Wellness

Frank John Ninivaggi, MD

Assistant Clinical Professor, Yale University Child Study Center, Attending Physician, Yale New Haven Hospital Health System

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Frank John Ninivaggi, MD, is an associate attending physician at Yale New Haven Hospital, an assistant clinical professor of child psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine's Child Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut, and the psychiatric director of the Devereux Glenholme School in Washington, Connecticut.

Dr. Ninivaggi received his adult psychiatric training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. He is Board Certified by the American Academy of Psychiatry and Neurology. He received specialty Fellowship training in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center, where he continues to hold dual university and Yale New Haven Hospital Health System appointments. He also received training in intensive child therapy in London in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the Anna Freud Center and the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations. In 1973, he trained in Clinical Medicine at the Radcliffe Infirmary Hospital at Oxford University, England, where he received honors under Dr. Paul B. Beeson, former chairman of Yale's Department of Internal Medicine. He also received formal training in Ayurvedic Medicine and holds a diploma in Ayurveda (Ayur. D) from the Western New England Institute for Ayurvedic Studies. Before entry into medical school, he trained in painting with artists Paulina Peavy and Maulsby Kimball in New York City and took courses at the Brooklyn Museum.

He is in private practice, performs school consultations, writes, and teaches at Yale. In 2004, he received the distinction of certification as a Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He has been a longtime member of the Connecticut State Medical Society. He is an active member of Yale's Physician Wellness, Engagement, and Burnout Prevention committees.

His long-standing research on conceptual intelligence, Borderline Intellectual Functioning and Academic Problems, has been published in Sadock, Sadock, and Ruiz (Editors), Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry , 8th edition (2005), 9th edition (2009), and 10th edition (2017). His new chapter, Malingering, is included in the 9th and 10th editions.

Dr. Ninivaggi's publications include the following textbooks: Ayurveda: A Comprehensive Guide to Traditional Indian Medicine for the West (2008, 2013), Envy Theory: Perspectives on the Psychology of Envy (2010), Biomental Child Development: Perspectives on Psychology and Parenting (2013), Making Sense of Emotion: Innovating Emotional Intelligence (2017) and a chapter, The Psychology of Aging, in Yue et al. (eds.), The Comprehensive Treatment of the Aging Spine: Minimally Invasive and Advanced Techniques (2011).

We are blessed and cursed by technology. Alive in a time unparalleled in the amount of available information and efficiency in any one moment, right at our fingertips, this level of connectedness also leaves us, more than ever, disconnected from each other. This removal from the patient is especially true for physicians and clinicians: we have a seemingly ever-increasing set of demands for treating our patients in guidelines and algorithmically based manners, and of course, documenting everything via our heralded (and mandated) electronic medical record.

Forced to choose between facing our computer terminals or our patients as we take their histories, our minds do mental mathematics, algorithms of their own trying to come up with the impossible solution of how to document encounters in time to get home for dinner (or if that seems impossible, at least a few hours of sleep), connect authentically with each patient, formulate an accurate diagnosis, and develop a treatment plan. All in the oft-quoted (and derided) 7-min visit.

Enter mindfulness. Not (though sometimes) viewed as some magical panacea, but instead, an inherent capacity that can be fostered and learned, mindfulness has seen an unprecedented resurgence from its humble millennia-old roots to modern-day medicine. Why? Frankly, one primary driver is the emphasis on understanding its underlying science and validating its effects through medicine's systematic approaches such as randomized controlled trials.