A Conversation with Michael Rutter

The Annual Review of Developmental Psychology presents a conversation with Professor Sir Michael Rutter, held remotely in the time of COVID but nonetheless wonderfully revealing of who this incredible scholar is and how he thinks. The contributions he has made to our understanding of child development are so vast and varied as to almost defy description. Erudite, articulate, and rigorous in his science, Michael Rutter is also deeply compassionate, caring, and outcome oriented. With training in medicine, neurology, pediatrics, and psychiatry, he held the first child psychiatry appointment in the United Kingdom and set up both the MRC Child Psychiatry Research Unit and the MRC Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre (SGDP). We feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to get to know Sir Michael, and to share this interview with you. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology Volume 3 is December 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

COMMUNICATION AND EMPATHY WITHIN PERSON-CENTERED MEDICINE: A DEVELOPMENTAL POINT OF VIEW

Communication between patients and health care providers (HCP) is at the heart of medicine and even more within its person-centered paradigm. Within a person centered medicine (PCM) perspective, it is thus crucial, for both the HCP and the patient, to build on a relationship with the objective to establish a therapeutic alliance and share decision making related to the patient’s health issues and to integrate the subjective aspects (and not only the objective aspects) of these health Issues. After showing that the effects of communication go beyond mere cognitive and affective sharing, particularly in highly emotional relations, this paper’sobjective is to understand more thoroughly what is transmitted in the patients/HCP relation and how some of the child and adolescent developmental psychiatry processes (i.e., early mother–baby interactions and transgenerational transmission of attachment) provide good models to understand this transmission.Building on these models, the paper will discuss how and at which conditions, the HCP’s narrative empathy plays a major role to access to the patient’s subjectivity through the HCP’s subjective experience. It concludes that, therefore, subjectivity of the HCPs should not be seen as a negative side effect of the patient–HCP (or the patient–team) relation but as a crucial clinical tool in person-centered diagnostics and cares if HCPs are properly trained and educated to use their feelings and representations as tools in individual or collective deliberations. But one has to be aware that there is no empathy without subjectivity.

The promise of two-person neuroscience for developmental psychiatry: using interaction-based sociometrics to identify disorders of social interaction

SummarySocial interactions are fundamental for human development, and disordered social interactions are pervasive in many psychiatric disorders. Recent advances in ‘two-person neuroscience’ have provided new tools for characterising social interactions. Accordingly, interaction-based ‘sociometrics’ hold great promise for developmental psychology and psychiatry, particularly in the early identification of social disorders.Declaration of interestNone.

The promise of two-person neuroscience for developmental psychiatry: Using interaction-based sociometrics to identify disorders of social interaction

Social interactions are fundamental for human development, and disordered social interactions are pervasive in many psychiatric disorders. Recent advances in “two-person neuroscience” have provided new tools for characterising social interactions. Accordingly, interaction-based ‘sociometrics’ hold great promise for developmental psychology and psychiatry, particularly in the early identification of social disorders.

The link between developmental psychiatry and dual disorders from early attachment to first drugs abuse

Since Dual Disorders expression was used for the first time, the old dilemma between cathegorial and dimensional grew again as a main issue because many authors wondered about its utility. The question was how far we can speak about two different entities, because doing so we are assuming comorbidity instead of a complex syndrome, with different clinical presentations (i.e. Talking about fever and cough instead of pneumonia). Child and adolescence psychiatry uses developmental psychiatry as a very useful tool to understand patients. Syndromes are seen as dynamic as patients. At the same time that patients grow their clinical presentations, evolves new symptoms or signs. We have reviewed retrospectively a group of twenty parents that were named as dual disorders, with different substance abuse but a common path in their childhood; all of them were diagnosed of ADHD and Conduct Disorder. We chose them because of the differences that DSM, ICD and main researchers have about this group, which some consider better described as a Disocial hiperquinetic disorder (ICD) than a AHDH with a conduct disorder associated (DSM), comorbidity again. We agreed with ICD opinion and will discuss how in some way we are somehow as those blind people describing different parts of the same elephant when we talk sometimes about dual. Truth is that opposite dual view or its syndromic treatment developmental psychiatry has all the time underlined the role of reward circuits/executive functions as epigenetic issues, both modulated by gene and environment.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.