Author Biography
Federico Sanchez Seabrook was born (1951) and raised in Mexico City. His mother is American and his father is Mexican. He graduated as a Mechanical Engineer from Tufts University in 1975. He paid his way through college as a photographer and model. Indirectly this put him in contact with various actors, producers and directors in Mexico City. He translated, several plays, among them, Green Julia, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, Equus, Same Time Next Year, The Changing Room, Gypsy, Agnes of God and Tamara. In the theater, he also worked in different capacities in these and other plays as assistant director, light design, set design and in Equus also did the choreography for the “horses” and “Rider”. His first job as an engineer was as the head of the Engineering Design Department at IACSA, a company in Cuernavaca, Mexico that manufactured valves and pistons for cars and trucks. For the most part he has run his own businesses as varied as silk screening, a cement block company, a grinding plant for nonmetallic minerals, and an open-pit mining of a volcanic ash supplied to Cementos Acapulco, S.A. Since 1987 he runs a design, manufacturing, wholesale and retail business of sterling silver accessories, Pat Areias Sterling, with his wife Pat. Presently they own three retail stores in Carmel, New York, and Beverly Hills. He is an avid tennis player. Since the death of his son Mitchell in 2002, he has studied the problem of how the brain works to explain suicide within a scientific framework. His first book, A thousand Moments of Solitude, A Personal Encounter With Suicide is about his personal experience about the death of his son, intertwined with explanations of psychiatrists’ diagnostic categories and a summary of his neuropsychological findings. His second book is a novel about suicide, Missing Person. His third book, Suicide Explained, A Neuropsychological Approach, is an in-depth study of suiicide and includes a neurological model of how the brain works, and how mental illness comes about. Ultimately it explains under what conditions and circumstances suicide can occur. His fourth book, Almost O.K., The Difference Between Life and Death, is a simplified version of his first book, which recounts his son’s battle with panic attacks and how, after his death, the author went about formulating his brain theories, and why as an engineer, his theories have met very little acceptance within the suicide community. He is currently finishing a book on neuropsychology, where he presents his theories on how the brain works, and how mental disorders come about. He uses an engineering approach to explain the brain using systems analysis; knowing what the brain does, the challenge is to figure out how what is inside the black box –our heads—how we think, remember, love, write books and occasionally how the brain goes haywire. They had two sons; Frederick Lawrence, graduated from UCal at Berkeley, also a Mechanical Engineer is currently living in Nevada, and Mitchell Xavier, graduated from UC at Santa Barbara.
