Rutter, Michael

   (See also Maudsley Hospital.)

   The founder of non-psychoanalytic child psychiatry in England, Rutter was born in 1933 to English parents who were living at the time in Lebanon. After spending the war years in the United States, he read medicine at Birmingham, graduating in 1955. He trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, then spend a postgraduate year at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, joining the Medical Research Council social psychiatry unit at the Maudsley in 1962. Four years later, in 1966, he became senior lecturer, remaining there for the rest of his career. In 1973, he was appointed professor of child psychiatry and head of the department; in 1984, he set up the child psychiatry research unit at the Maudsley and in 1994 the research center for social, genetic, and developmental psychiatry, from which he retired as director in 1998, acquiring the post of professor of developmental psychophathology. (He was knighted in 1992.)

   After 1979, Rutter became known in particular for his work on protective factors and vulnerability in children. Writing in 1987 in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, he said, "We need to ask why and how some individuals manage to maintain high self-esteem and self-efficacy in spite of facing the same adversities that lead other people to give up and lose hope. . . . The search is not for broadly defined protective factors but, rather, for the developmental and situational mechanisms involved in protective processes" (p. 317). Rutter and co-workers at the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Maudsley also pioneered the epidemiology of psychiatric disorder in children, finding, in an article published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 1975, twice as much deviance and psychiatric disorder among 10-year-old children in an inner London borough as on the Isle of Wight.