Grunya Sukhareva

Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva (Груня Ефимовна Сухарева) (November 11, 1891 – April 26, 1981) was a Soviet child psychiatrist. She was the first to publish a detailed description of autistic symptoms, in Russian in 1925 and in German a year later. She initially used the term “schizoid (meaning of the time: eccentric) psychopathy” but later replaced it with “autistic (pathological avoidant) 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.

Life

Sukhareva was born in Kiev to the Jewish family of Khaim Faitelevich and Rakhil Iosifovna Sukhareva. Between 1917 and 1921 she worked in a psychiatric hospital in Kiev. From 1921 she worked in Moscow, 1933–1925 she was leading the department of Psychiatry in Kharkov university. 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 (НКЗ РСФСР). For many years she worked as a councillor and leader of Psychiatric hospital of Kashchenko in Moscow.