Psychiatric Bulletin (2004) 28: 429. doi: 10.1192/pb.28.11.429
© 2004 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Psychiatric Bulletin (2004) 28: 429
© 2004 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Richard Charles Harrington
Ian Goodyer
Formerly Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Royal Manchester
Children’s Hospital
Dick Harrington, as he was known, was born on 22 October 1956 and was an
outstanding child psychiatrist who achieved a radical revision of our
understanding of childhood depression. As a result of his work, we have
evidence-based clinical practice, and systematic methods for evaluating the
process and the outcome of psychological treatment given to young people with
affective disorders. His early work consisted of follow-up studies of patients
who had attended the child psychiatry out-patients’ department at the
Maudsley Hospital in southeast London, which showed that depressive conditions
in the school-age years persisted and recurred in a significant number of
cases.
A childhood history of depression was associated with increased risk of
recurrent depressive illness, a poorer work record and greater instability in
intimate relationships in adult life. Harrington demonstrated that around a
third of depressed children were liable to suffer recurrent depression as
adults. He also found that those who first became depressed as adolescents
fared far worse in the long run than those who suffered depression in
childhood. The emerging view in the early 1990s was that there might be a
genetic predisposition to depressive disorders, and that this was more likely
to show in earlier childhood. Harrington was among the first to suggest that
the opposite may be the case with depressive illness beginning in adolescence
more likely to be partly genetic in origin and those in childhood less so.
Himself the son of a psychiatrist, Richard Charles Harrington was born in
Birmingham and educated at Bedford School and Birmingham Medical School. He
trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, and by his mid-30s was
recognised as a clinical academic scholar with outstanding insights into
mental illness in children, based on his own research. In 1991, he left the
Institute of Psychiatry to take up a post as senior lecturer at Birmingham
University, before moving to a chair at Manchester University two years later.
Over the next 10 years, he established one of the most active and productive
child and adolescent psychiatry research groups in the world.
Building on his work on the origins of depression, his team developed
cognitive-behaviour therapy treatments for children and adolescents with
depressive disorders. Subsequently, Harrington developed a new interest in the
origins of antisocial, aggressive and hyperactive behaviour disorders in young
children. He was again among the first to show that the parent-friendly
psychological interventions used for depression could give clues to possible
treatments for these behavioural disorders. He established detailed protocols
for ‘model’ treatments, including group treatments for adolescents
who had repeatedly harmed themselves and parent training groups for families
with behaviourally disturbed children.
He was chairman of the British Child Psychiatry Research Society and
Vice-President of the European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He
undertook committee work with the same care and dedication he brought to his
research and clinical practice. He also served on scientific committees at the
Wellcome Trust, the Health Foundation Trust and the Department of Health.
In the course of his career he published 150 articles and three books, and
in 1998 he won the Nathan Cummings Foundation Award for best original research
in the field of depression in young people. At the time of his death he was
completing with colleagues in Manchester and Cambridge what is to date the
largest randomised controlled trial of anti-depressant medication, with and
without cognitive-behaviour therapy. He died from complications of surgery on
22 May 2004, aged 47, and is survived by his wife, Lesley, and their three
children.
