Michael Rutter

Sir Michael Llewellyn Rutter CBE FRS FRCP FRCPsych FMedSci (15 August 1933 – 23 October 2021) was the first person to be appointed professor of child psychiatry in the United Kingdom.

He has been described as the "father of child psychiatry".

In 1940, at the age of 7, Rutter was evacuated, with his younger sister, to North America amid fears of a German invasion.

They were sent to different households, and he had a much happier time than his sister Priscilla.

They both returned to their family in 1944

Rutter attended the Moorestown Friends School in New Jersey, USA.

Later he attended Wolverhampton Grammar School and then Bootham School in York.

Here a physics teacher encouraged him to read works of Freud, and he trained himself to wake up and write down his dreams.

This marked the beginning of his journey into psychology.

He continued his studies at the University of Birmingham Medical School, originally intending to become a GP and join his father in his practice.

However, he became more interested in the relationship between the brain, mind and neurosurgery, and went into post-graduate training in neurology and paediatrics.

He was mentored by Sir Aubrey Lewis at the Maudsley Hospital in South London, who guided him towards becoming a child psychiatrist.

Rutter had not realised before this point that this was a profession that would suit him well.

Rutter was professor of developmental psychopathology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, and consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, a post he held from 1966 until retiring in July 2021.

Rutter was professor of developmental psychopathology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London and consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, a post he held since 1966, until retiring in July 2021.

In 1972, Rutter published 'Maternal Deprivation Reassessed', which New Society describes as "a classic in the field of child care" in which he evaluated the maternal deprivation hypothesis propounded by Dr John Bowlby in 1951.

Bowlby had proposed that “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment” and that not to do so may have significant and irreversible mental health consequences.

This theory was both influential and controversial.

He was the European Editor for the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders between 1974 and 1994.

Rutter made a significant contribution, his 1981 monograph and other papers (Rutter 1972; Rutter 1979) constituting the definitive empirical evaluation and update of Bowlby's early work on maternal deprivation.

He amassed further evidence, addressed the many different underlying social and psychological mechanisms and showed that Bowlby was only partially right and often for the wrong reasons.

Rutter highlighted the other forms of deprivation found in institutional care, the complexity of separation distress and suggested that anti-social behaviour was not linked to maternal deprivation as such but to family discord.

The importance of these refinements of the maternal deprivation hypothesis was to reposition it as a "vulnerability factor" rather than a causative agent, with a number of varied influences determining which path a child will take.

Rutter set up the Medical Research Council (UK) Child Psychiatry Research Unit in 1984 and the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre ten years later, being Honorary Director of both until October 1998.

After the end of Nicolae Ceauşescu's regime in Romania in 1989, Rutter led the English and Romanian Adoptees Study Team, following many of the orphans adopted into Western families into their teens in a series of substantial studies on the effects of early privation and deprivation across multiple domains affecting child development including attachment and the development of new relationships.

The results yielded some reason for optimism.

He was Deputy Chairman of the Wellcome Trust from 1999 to 2004, and was a Trustee of the Nuffield Foundation from 1992 to 2008.

Rutter's work includes: early epidemiological studies (Isle of Wight and Inner London); studies of autism involving a wide range of scientific techniques and disciplines, including DNA study and neuroimaging; links between research and practice; deprivation; influences of families and schools; genetics; reading disorders; biological and social, protective and risk factors; interactions of biological and social factors; stress; longitudinal as well as epidemiologic studies, including childhood and adult experiences and conditions; and continuities and discontinuities in normal and pathological development.

The British Journal of Psychiatry credits him with a number of "breakthroughs" in these areas.

Rutter is also recognized as contributing centrally to the establishment of child psychiatry as a medical and biopsychosocial specialty with a solid scientific base.

He published over 400 scientific papers and chapters and some 40 books.

A survey published in Review of General Psychology in 2002 ranked Rutter as the 68th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

He died of cancer on 23 October 2021, aged 88.

Rutter was the oldest child born to Winifred (née Barber) and Llewellyn Rutter.

He was born in Lebanon where his father was a doctor, and was bilingual in English and Arabic by the age of 3.

The family moved back to England when he was 4 years old.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Rutter as the 68th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

He has been described as the "father of child psychology".

Rutter was the first to recognise the contributions that children themselves could make to the research into child psychology.

In June 2014, Rutter was the guest on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific, in which he described himself as a Nontheist Quaker, as well as revealing that, at the age of 80, he still worked each day "from about half past eight until about four".