Grunya Sukhareva — Mia Woo
The word autism, from the Greek word autos, was first used by Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss psychiatrist trying to define schizophrenia. Another important figure in autistic history, often overlooked, is Soviet psychiatrist Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva. Inspired by Bleuler’s studies, she wanted to characterise the term autism more fully, rather than go by Bleuler’s general definition: “withdrawn from oneself”.
In 1924, a 12-year-old boy visited a Moscow clinic for an evaluation. Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva saw the boy, and through diagnosis, described him as a child with autism. Sukhareva decided to study five additional boys who she identified had “autisic tendencies”, similarly to the first boy she encountered, and in 1925 published a paper describing in detail the features that the six boys who were autistic shared and had.
Yet, despite her work being influential as the first academic description of symptoms surrounding autism, she is often forgotten in history. Throughout her career, Sukhareva published more than 150 papers, six monographs, and several textbooks about topics like intellectual disability, schizophrenia, and personality disorders among other conditions. She graduated from medical school in Kiev in 1915, and joined Kiev’s psychiatric hospital during the Russian Revolution two years later while many other medical professionals chose to flee. In 1921, Sukhareva worked at the Psycho-Neurological and Pedagogical Sanatorium School of the Institute of Physical Training and Medical Pedology in Moscow. She worked with children who were orphaned, displaced, or traumatised from World War I, the Russian Revolution, civil wars, and even the Spanish Flu epidemic. The clinic took a more scientific approach towards providing the children the support they needed. It was through this experience that Sukhareva was able to describe traits on the autism spectrum as accurately as she did. Detailed, noting haemoglobin counts, muscle tones, gastric health, skin conditions, and even behavioural changes like lack of smiles, excessive moments, and changes in vocal tones.
To add specificity to her achievements, Sukhareva was one of the first researchers who started to detach autism from childhood schizophrenia, of which the two were often mistaken as one condition. She saw autism as a part of brain development, separate from many beliefs at the time where autism was an effect of bad parenting or surroundings. She, along with two other psychiatrists George Frankl and Leo Kanner viewed autism as a neurobiological condition that people were born with, whereas many other psychiatrists at the time saw it as a behavioural “problem” that should be “corrected with therapy”.
Her study paper was translated to and published in German in 1925, with many psychiatrists at the time being German or Austrian, yet her work was unknown for decades. Her name was also misspelt as “Ssucharewa”, thereby separating her true name with her article. Two decades later when Hans Asperger published his own research for Asperger syndrome, it was unidentified at the time that Sukhareva had already published the same research two decades before. There is controversy between whether he had read Sukhareva’s article and decided not to cite her, however nothing has been confirmed. Her work reached the English-speaking world in 1996, 15 years after her death, when British psychiatrist Sula Wolff happened to come across it.
Ultimately, Sukhareva being the first in history to document and identify autistic symptoms in 1925 as well as scientifically “discovering” Asperger syndrome has led to significant advancement in our modern understanding of neurodiversity, specifically autism and Asperger syndrome. She and many subsequent psychiatrists collectively helped identify the many parts of autism, and it was through this abundance of research that we know about the many parts of the autism spectrum today. Sukhareva was only the beginning.
