Grunya Sukhareva


Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva was a Soviet child psychiatrist. She was the first to publish a detailed description of autistic symptoms in 1925. The original paper was in Russian and published in German a year later. Sula Wolff translated it in 1996 for the English-speaking world.
She initially used the term "schizoid psychopathy", "schizoid" meaning "eccentric" at the time, but later replaced it with "autistic psychopathy" to describe the clinical picture of autism. The article was created almost two decades before the case reports of Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner, which were published while Sukhareva's pioneering work remained unnoticed. This is possibly because of various political and language barriers at the time. Her name was transliterated as "Ssucharewa" when her papers appeared in Germany, and the autism researcher Hans Asperger likely chose not to cite her work, due to his affiliation with the Nazi Party and her Jewish heritage.

Biography

Sukhareva was born in Kiev to the Jewish family of Chaim Faitelevich and Rachil Iosifovna Sukhareva. Between 1917 and 1921, she worked in a psychiatric hospital in Kiev. From 1921, she worked in Moscow, and from 1933 to 1935 she was leading the department of Psychiatry in Kharkov University.
Sukhareva studied autistic children, and described them in a way which has been compared to the modern description of autism in the DSM V. She helped open schools for autistic children where they participated in multiple activities, such as gymnastics, drawing, and woodwork.
In 1935, Sukhareva founded a Faculty of Pediatric Psychiatry in the Central Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education. In 1938, she led a clinic of childhood psychosis under the Russian SFSR Ministry of Agriculture and Food. For many years, she worked as a councillor and leader of the Psychiatric Hospital of Kashchenko in Moscow.
Sukhareva believed that for personality disorders to appear in children and teenagers, a significant social factor was required. Some of the factors she discussed for personality disorders were a poor family environment and societal structure. She was a pioneer in using the method of suggestion, and fought for children's rights, stating that difficult children should not be sent to labor camps, but to medical institutions. She also studied PTSD from war injuries sustained by children.
By order of the Moscow Department of Health, the Moscow Scientific and Practical Center for Mental Health of Children and Adolescents was named after Sukhareva, with the prefix G. E. Sukhareva appended to the front. The center is the leading specialized medical institution for the treatment of suicidal states in children and adolescents under 18 years of age.

Selected works