Richard C. Harrington

Richard Charles Harrington (born October 22, 1956 in Birmingham , † May 23, 2004 in Manchester ) was Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Manchester , England. His research results in the field of mental illnesses in children, in particular childhood depression and its treatment with the aid of cognitive behavioral therapy , remain groundbreaking even after his death.

Richard Harrington was born in Birmingham to a practicing psychiatrist and went to school at Bedford School . From 1975 he studied at Birmingham Medical School , where he received awards for excellence in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and in clinical psychiatry. After graduation, he became a psychiatric graduate assistant at Maudsley Hospital . After attaining the title of specialist in clinical psychiatry, he became a Master of Philosophy and decided to continue working in the newly developing field of child and adolescent psychiatry. At the world-renowned specialist department for child and adolescent psychiatry under Sir Michael Rutter, he began research on family dynamics and the long-term disease progression of children and adolescents with depression, with the results of which he completed his doctorate at the University of Birmingham. In 1991 he left the Department of Psychiatry and became Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Birmingham University . In 1994 he moved to the Chair of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Manchester . He also conducted research in the field of child depression , but expanded his research to include early behavioral disorders . More and more detailed protocols for the treatment of depressed children have been developed. These included individual treatments for children based on cognitive behavioral therapy, but also group therapies for depressed children and self-harming adolescents, as well as training groups for parents of children with behavioral disorders .

He became a board member of the British Child Psychiatry Research Society and secretary and vice-president of the European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) . In 1998 he received the Nathan Cummings Foundation Award from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) . In the summer of 2004, shortly after his death, the largest comparative study to date of antidepressant medication with and without behavioral therapy in childhood depression was completed with colleagues from Manchester and Cambridge .

The 16th World Congress of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Berlin in August 2004 was dedicated to the memory of Harrington.

Standard work in German

• Cognitive behavior therapy in depressed children and adolescents, Hogrefe-Verlag Göttingen 2001, ISBN 978-3801714857