Healy, William (1869–1963)

Diagnosis and Treatment of Juvenile Delinquents

Child psychiatry grew out of the newly formed juvenile courts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which judges requested professional assistance in understanding the children who appeared before them in court. In 1909, Ethel Sturges Dummer, a society figure, provided substantial financing to help establish the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute in Chicago. Healy was selected as Director of the Institute and as the psychiatrist of the first child guidance clinic. The institute was linked to the juvenile court and served to evaluate and diagnose children seen by the court. Because of the belief that the use of psychiatric means could effectively treat antisocial behavior in children, such clinics proliferated and were patterned after Healy's original institute.

Healy hired one of his former students, Augusta Fox Bronner, to be a psychologist at the institute. They jointly published several pieces and, after his wife's death, Healy and Bronner married. Healy and Bronner developed the team concept of working with a patient by bringing together social workers, psychologists, and others to analyze a case.

Healy's interest in emotional aspects of personality fueled his desire to work with children who had behavior problems and delinquency issues. His book The Individual Delinquent, published in 1915, asserted that understanding a child's behavior was [Page 201]possible only by an examination of the child's unique individual history. At the institute, Healy applied the “own story” approach, a technique influenced by psychoanalysis and later relied on by Clifford Shaw in his chronicling of a boy's delinquency in The Jackroller: A Delinquent Boy's Own Story. Healy had examined the book's main character, Stanley, emphasizing the importance of understanding a delinquent child's attitudes and mental conflicts through the subject aspects of the life history.

By 1914, the Institute's funding was exhausted, and Cook County began to provide funding. But the county only wanted Healy's diagnoses and had no interest in the institute's research and treatment. In 1917 the newly created Department of Public Welfare assumed control of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, made it a part of the Division of the Criminologist, and renamed it the Institute for Juvenile Research. The institution began to serve as a research center, and it coordinated child guidance and delinquency activity to be implemented throughout the state.

Other Significant Contributions

Healy was persuaded to expand on the Chicago model, and philanthropists in the Boston area provided funding to open the Judge Baker Foundation clinic in 1917, which became the international model for child guidance. Significantly aided by Bronner as director, Healy expanded on efforts to understand and help, rather than punish, delinquent children.

Healy testified in a number of cases, including a landmark case in the fight against capital punishment in the United States. He examined the defendants of the 1924 abduction-murder trial, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, in which the two 19-year-old college students from one of Chicago's most affluent neighborhoods killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks. Healy's testimony revealed that Leopold had an established pathological personality before he met the other defendant, Loeb, and had he not been in association with Loeb, he would not have been tempted to kidnap and kill Franks.

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