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DAVID BORRELLI |
Given the private nature of psychiatric treatment, it is not surprising that some patients left anonymous tributes in the online obituary guest book for Dr. David J. Borrelli.
"Before I started with him, I was very ill to say the least," said an entry signed "A thankful patient" from Cambridge. "Now, I am able to live a normal life because of the treatment and care I received from him. Words cannot describe just how talented and kind he was. Dr. Borrelli was a gift from God, and he will hold a very special place in my heart for as long as I live."
A student of the mind, Dr. Borrelli underwent psychoanalysis to better understand himself, used Carl Jung's work to study dreams, and gravitated toward psychopharmacology in the treatment of depression and bipolar disorder. He died Feb. 9 in Massachusetts General Hospital, less than a year after being diagnosed with a rare gastric cancer. Dr. Borrelli was 59 and had lived in Needham most of his life.
"He loved his patients, and his patients loved him," Cheryl Freedman Borrelli said of her husband. "He would use a lot of humor with his patients and metaphors."
Years ago, Dr. Borrelli left Massachusetts to attend college and medical school. He returned for a residency at Tufts-New England Medical Center. He completed his training in 1978 and, at 28, joined a private practice in Brookline, taking on about 50 patients.
He had a private practice the rest of his life, seeing patients until just a few weeks before he died. Dr. Borrelli also worked at several facilities, including as chief psychiatrist for the adult unit at Charles River Hospital in Wellesley in the early 1980s. He became medical director of the adult partial hospitalization program at Westwood Lodge Hospital, where for a time he was acting medical director.
Dr. Borrelli was an attending psychiatrist at Mass. General, working with the Bipolar Clinic and Research Program, and most recently had been an attending psychiatrist with Harvard University Health Services. Last year, he was inducted as a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.
"He worked very hard and intensely in everything he did," his wife said, "and he played hard and intensely in everything he did."
At Needham High School, from which he graduated in 1965, he was a three-sport athlete, playing football, basketball, and baseball. Dr. Borrelli, who retained close friends from his high school years, became serious about schoolwork when he went to Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, graduating in 1970 with a degree in biology.
While attending medical school at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, N.Y., Dr. Borrelli met Cheryl Freedman at a party mutual friends hosted one evening in 1972. He looked at her from across the room and halfway through the evening went over to talk.
"I loved his blue eyes and the twinkle in his eyes and the dimples in his cheeks," she said. "And we were children of the '60s, so he had long hair."
Dr. Borrelli also had the unruffled demeanor that would serve him well as a psychiatrist.
"He was somebody who was just so easy and gentle to talk to, and we laughed a lot," she said. "We had our first date the next evening."
They married the next year. After they went back to the Boston area and Dr. Borrelli began his practice, the couple purchased a house in 1979 that his father had built for them in Needham. There they stayed, raising their daughter, Anna, and their son, Jonah, who now lives in Somerville.
For several years the family kept a townhouse near the Waterville Valley ski resort in New Hampshire, his wife said, "and he would pack us up for the weekend. He would pack up our sandwiches in the morning and label them, then help us into our ski wear."
There also were trips to Inverness, Nova Scotia, where Dr. Borrelli's mother had been part of a MacNeil clan that emigrated from Scotland.
And many vacations were shared only by Dr. Borrelli and his wife, particularly after she was diagnosed with cancer in 1992. She decided they should take a trip to celebrate each five years of survival, and they traveled to places such as England, France, Italy, and Africa.
"Our trips were always romantic, and it was very important that we went alone," she said. "A friend told me, 'I don't know anybody who takes as many weekends alone as you two,' and I said, 'That's the only time I can have my husband to myself, away from work.' "
He was, she said, her shelter from the storm. "He provided that safe haven for me," she said.
That haven was also there for patients, as one noted in an anonymous posting in the online guest book that praised Dr. Borrelli's giving manner.
"He once said to me, 'I'm not greedy' . . . and he wasn't," one patient wrote. "Bless him and your family. . . . There will never be anyone as kind as this man."
In addition to his wife, son, and daughter, Dr. Borrelli leaves two sisters, Deborah Katz of Manhattan, N.Y., and Nancy of Millis; and a brother, Stephen of Needham.
A service has been held.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
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