28 Facts About Michael Rutter

Michael Rutter has been described as the "father of child psychiatry".

Michael Rutter was the oldest child born to Winifred and Llewellyn Michael Rutter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Rutter set up the Medical Research Council 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.

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

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

Michael Rutter published over 400 scientific papers and chapters and some 40 books.

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

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

Michael Rutter 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.

Michael 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.

In June 2014, Michael 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".

Michael 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.

Michael Rutter has been described as the "father of child psychology".

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

Michael Rutter's concentration is often reflected in his comments dealing with deprived learning environments and deprived emotional environment as these affect the child's growth.

One of the principal distinctions which Michael Rutter makes throughout his book titled The Qualities of Mothering is the difference between intellectual retardation in the child and the impairment of the emotional growth of the child as the non-development of healthy emotional growth.

Michael Rutter had honorary degrees from the universities of Leiden, Amsterdam, Louvain, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Chicago, Minnesota, Ghent, Jyvaskyla, Warwick, East Anglia, Cambridge and Yale.

Michael Rutter was an honorary fellow of the British Academy and an elected Fellow of the Royal Society.

Michael Rutter was a Founding Fellow of the Academia Europaea and the Academy of Medical Sciences and was knighted in the 1992 New Year Honours.

Michael Rutter married Marjorie Heys, a nurse, on 27 December 1958.

Michael Rutter's interests included fell walking, tennis, wine tasting and theatre.

Michael Rutter died at home in Dulwich, London on 23 October 2021, aged 88.