This profile is part of "The Record Stands," a TROH special series.
The number everyone quotes about Dr. Steve Tutty is 2,300, the children and adolescents he has evaluated and treated over more than 25 years. Fair enough; it is a remarkable figure. The number almost nobody quotes is 535. Across the same career, Tutty has conducted more than 535 evaluations of adults, many involving traumatic brain injury, in arenas like personal-injury litigation where the difference between a careful evaluation and a sloppy one can shape the rest of a person's life.
That second number is the least-reported chapter of his career. It deserves its own article. This is that article.
The Number, In Context
More than 535 adult evaluations. Many involving traumatic brain injury. Those evaluations sit alongside the rest of his forensic work: custody matters, personal-injury litigation, and brain-injury cases, all of them settings where, as his record puts it, the stakes are highest.
Tutty is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in child, forensic, and neuropsychology. Slow down on that third specialty. Neuropsychology is the discipline concerned with what brain injury and illness do to thinking, emotion, and daily functioning. It is the specialty you want in the room when the central question of a case is what an injury did to a person's mind. Pair it with his National Health Scholar background, spanning hospitals, schools, wilderness programs, universities, and research institutions, and you have an evaluator who has watched injury and recovery from more angles than most clinicians ever see.
Then put the number itself under the light. Five hundred thirty-five adult evaluations is a body of work, accumulated case by case, referral by referral, report by report. Every one of those files represents an adult who sat across from him and opened up a life, often at the worst moment of it, and a set of decisions downstream that leaned on what he wrote. Volume like that does two things at once. It builds the kind of pattern recognition that only repetition can teach, and it creates hundreds of occasions for someone to dislike the conclusion. Both facts belong in any honest account.
The Injuries That Hide
What does Tutty himself say about traumatic brain injury? His public writing makes two documented points. He explains the hidden cognitive and emotional toll of TBI, and he explains why neuropsychological evaluation guides recovery.
Every word of that earns its place. Start with "hidden." A broken leg announces itself on an X-ray. A brain injury can walk into a room looking like a healthy adult, while memory, attention, judgment, and emotional control have been quietly rearranged. The person injured knows something is wrong. The world keeps grading them as if nothing is. In litigation, that gap between appearance and reality is exactly where injured people get doubted, and exactly where careful neuropsychological evaluation earns its keep.
Then the second point: evaluation guides recovery. In Tutty's documented framing, the evaluation is the map. It tells the treatment team what the injury took, what it spared, and where rehabilitation should aim. Skip the map, and recovery becomes guesswork with a patient's future on the table.
The Discipline Court Work Demands
Adult forensic evaluation is a peculiar kind of clinical work, and Tutty has described its core tension in his own words: "When the court orders a mental health evaluation, our client is actually the judge and/or commissioner, and the balance between objectivity and client compassion can be difficult."
Read that sentence twice. The person across the desk is in pain, often frightened, sometimes desperate for a particular outcome, and the evaluator's client is the court. Objectivity on one shoulder, compassion on the other, and the job is to honor both without surrendering either. Tutty names that balance as difficult, which is what honest professionals say about work that is, in fact, difficult. An evaluator who found it easy would worry us more.
His documented method for holding that balance starts long before the injury or the lawsuit: "Spend time reviewing the client's developmental history, starting at birth, prior to the crisis in question," he explains, "as this information can provide an opportunity for the provider to better understand the person from a holistic lens." In a brain-injury case, that method has an obvious logic. To understand what an injury changed, you first have to understand the person it changed. The whole life is the baseline. We explore that method in depth elsewhere in this series.
Why This Chapter Stayed Invisible
So why has none of this appeared in the coverage? The recent reporting dwells on a Statement of Charges from the Washington Department of Health's Examining Board of Psychology, which is a set of allegations at the opening of a process, one side's account, untested by cross-examination. Tutty maintains that his evaluation work followed Washington law and professional standards at every step, and he is entitled to contest every allegation in the document.
Fair enough as far as it goes. But a career is the sum of its work, and 535 adult evaluations, many of them involving the most invisible and most contested injuries in civil litigation, are part of that sum. So is the public teaching that those injuries hide, and that evaluation is what guides recovery. Coverage that counts complaints while skipping casework is giving you arithmetic with half the numbers missing.
The Bottom Line
More than 535 adults. Traumatic brain injuries that hide in plain sight. A clinician who tells the public why those injuries are easy to miss and why neuropsychological evaluation is the instrument that finds them. In our opinion, any honest account of Dr. Steve Tutty has to include this chapter, because the adults behind those 535 evaluations were promised a careful look at their lives, and the record says they got one.
That is what the record shows. And the record stands.
Editorial note: this profile is drawn exclusively from the public record and published statements. Dr. Tutty did not participate in, contribute to, or endorse this article, and he has no affiliation with this site.