Heart disease is a leading cause of death, and depression, anxiety, and hostility all independently raise the risk of a second cardiac event. Yet behavioral cardiology has been slower than fields like oncology to build psychological treatment into standard cardiac care.
Read in order, these three books trace behavioral cardiology’s own development: one author’s original clinical model, a wider edited collection that followed it, and a concise primer written for practitioners new to the specialty.
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Psychotherapy With Cardiac Patients: Behavioral Cardiology in Practice
Ellen A. Dornelas, PhD, American Psychological Association, 2008
This guide is organized in three parts: understanding behavioral cardiology, psychosocial factors in cardiovascular disease, and special topics in care. It opens with an overview of the cardiovascular system itself before working through the lifestyle and psychological risk factors for heart disease. Later chapters cover practical techniques for depression, anxiety, and hostility specifically, since all three complicate cardiac recovery. A final section addresses substance abuse, obesity, and sex differences in treatment response, illustrated throughout with case material.
Recommended for clinicians who want one practitioner’s complete, coherent clinical approach to cardiac patients, rather than the range of voices in the edited collection below.
Stress Proof the Heart: Behavioral Interventions for Cardiac Patients
Edited by Ellen A. Dornelas, Springer, 2012
Dornelas explicitly built this edited volume to address a gap her own 2008 book couldn’t fill alone: there were still very few resources written specifically for clinicians treating psychologically distressed cardiac patients. Contributors cover practical behavioral approaches for patients dealing with sleep problems and difficulty motivating themselves to exercise or quit smoking. They close with guidance on integrating these separate behavioral treatments into one comprehensive treatment model.
Dornelas also edits the American Psychological Association’s six-book Clinical Health Psychology series, which includes Burg’s book below. That gives her a hand in shaping much of the field’s clinical literature beyond her own two cardiac-specific books.
This is the book for building out a fuller toolkit across multiple specific problems. Recommended for practitioners who’ve outgrown a single clinician’s framework and want contributors who each specialize in one piece of cardiac behavioral care.
Psychological Treatment of Cardiac Patients
Matthew M. Burg, PhD, American Psychological Association, 2018
This book is part of the same APA Clinical Health Psychology series Dornelas edits. It is a deliberately brief, thorough primer covering the foundational knowledge a mental health practitioner needs before working with cardiac patients. Topics include helping patients adjust to their condition, change unhealthy behaviors, and cope with invasive interventions like surgery and implantable devices. It covers assessment and intervention for comorbid depression, anxiety, sleep dysregulation, and sexual dysfunction specifically. It also gives particular attention to the role family and social networks play in heart disease, and uses the palliative care model to address end-of-life dilemmas cardiac patients and their clinicians sometimes face.
Start here if you want the fastest orientation to the field. It’s built to be read cover to cover in a sitting, not worked through like the fuller texts above.