Grunya Sukhareva

Grunya Sukhareva (Kyiv, 1891 – Moscow, 1981) was a child psychiatrist widely regarded as a pioneer in the study of autism. She worked across the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, at a time when the concept was only beginning to circulate in psychiatry. Her importance lies in having described in detail a clinical picture that the discipline would take decades to recognise as its own.

She studied medicine in Kyiv and qualified in 1915. After working at a psychiatric hospital in her native city, she moved to Moscow in 1921 and founded a school-sanatorium for children left without families after the First World War. There, through careful clinical observation, she prepared her best-known work, published in Russian in 1925 and in German the following year. It described six boys with traits she called 'schizoid psychopathy', a term she later replaced with 'autistic psychopathy'. She followed it with a study of girls, a group that was very little researched at the time.

Her output was considerable, with well over a hundred and fifty papers and several textbooks. In 1935 she founded a faculty of paediatric psychiatry in Moscow and for years led a clinic for childhood psychosis. She argued that children with serious difficulties belonged in medical institutions rather than prisons, and she is credited with early work on post-traumatic stress in children affected by war.

Her most forward-looking idea was that autism is an innate neurobiological condition. She suggested that the cerebellum, the basal ganglia and the frontal lobes might be involved, hypotheses that more recent neuroimaging studies have largely borne out. She also proposed a treatment that went beyond psychiatry to include education, family and social context.

Her work remained largely unknown for decades. It was not translated into English until 1996, partly because of Soviet isolation. Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner published their case reports almost two decades later, and Asperger did not cite her. Today she is recognised as a pioneer, and a Moscow centre for children's mental health bears her name.