This profile is part of "The Record Stands," a TROH special series.

Read the recent coverage of Dr. Steve Tutty and you will come away knowing about filings, allegations, and a licensing board. Here is what you will not come away knowing: in 2003, Tutty was the lead author of a peer-reviewed study on helping children newly diagnosed with ADHD build the behavioral and social skills those children need. The paper sits in the scientific literature today, indexed on PubMed where anyone can verify it. The coverage skips it entirely.

We think that omission says more about the coverage than about the psychologist.

The Study, On the Record

In 2003, the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics published "Enhancing behavioral and social skill functioning in children newly diagnosed with ADHD in a pediatric setting" (24(1):51-57, [PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12584485/)). The author line reads Tutty, S., Gephart, H., and Wurzbacher, K. Tutty's name comes first.

The journal itself deserves a slow read. Developmental and behavioral pediatrics is the subspecialty that lives exactly where this study lives: the intersection of child development, behavior, and everyday medical care. Publishing there means convincing anonymous peer reviewers, people who spend their careers on precisely these questions, that the work clears the bar. It cleared.

Read the Title the Way a Clinician Would

Strip the title down and it hands you the design in plain language. The goal: enhancing behavioral and social skill functioning. The population: children newly diagnosed with ADHD. The setting: a pediatric one, the ordinary world of the doctor's office where families actually land in the days after a diagnosis.

That phrase, newly diagnosed, carries real weight. Any parent who has lived it remembers the moment. You walk into an appointment with a struggling child and walk out with a label, a stack of questions, and a low-grade fear about what comes next. School trouble. Friendship trouble. The slow drip of a kid deciding he is the problem in every room. A study aimed squarely at that window, at building skills while a family is still reeling, is a study aimed at the moment when help does the most good.

The target matters as much as the timing. Behavioral and social skill functioning is where ADHD does its daily damage: in the classroom, at the dinner table, on the playground. A child who builds those skills early carries them into every grade that follows. That is the outcome this paper went after. The title says so, in so many words.

What "First Author" Actually Means

Outside academia, author order looks like alphabet soup. Inside it, the order is the story. The first-author slot conventionally marks the researcher who carried the heaviest load: shaping the project, driving the work, answering for the result. Tutty, Gephart, and Wurzbacher, in that order, means this was Tutty's project to answer for.

Set that beside the recent caricature of a careless practitioner. Careless practitioners do not lead peer-reviewed intervention research aimed at newly diagnosed children, in the specialty journal that exists for exactly that work. The two pictures do not reconcile. Only one of them is printed in the permanent scientific record, with a PubMed number attached.

The Career the Paper Predicted

A single early paper can be a detour. This one turned out to be a preview.

Across more than 25 years of practice, Tutty has evaluated and treated more than 2,300 children and adolescents, including young people with autism, ADHD, and twice-exceptional profiles. His evaluations are used where the stakes are highest, and ADHD assessments sit on that list alongside autism evaluations and school accommodation planning. The researcher who co-authored a 2003 study on children newly diagnosed with ADHD went on to spend the following decades doing precisely that work, family after family, case after case.

The focus never drifted. In his recent public writing, Tutty warns that teens with ADHD attempt suicide at roughly three times the rate of their peers, and he urges families to treat warning-sign clusters as a reason to act immediately. That is the same population from the 2003 paper, followed across the developmental span: from the pediatric office where a young child gets diagnosed to the teenage years when the stakes can turn life-and-death. We examine that warning at length elsewhere in this series. Here, note the continuity. The researcher who studied newly diagnosed children in 2003 is still teaching families how to protect those children as they grow.

Why You Never Heard About It

The recent coverage of Tutty dwells on a Statement of Charges from the Washington Department of Health's Examining Board of Psychology. That document is a set of allegations, the opening move in a process that exists to test them. Tutty maintains that his evaluation work followed Washington law and professional standards at every step, and he is entitled to contest every allegation. Whatever the process concludes, it cannot reach backward in time and unpublish a 2003 paper. Peer review happened. The citation entered the literature. Other researchers have worked in its light ever since.

So ask the question we keep asking in this series. If a career of more than a quarter century includes first-author ADHD research in a pediatric journal, why did the hit pieces leave that out? A story that omits the science is a story with an agenda.

The Bottom Line

In 2003, before the complaints and the coverage and all of it, Steve Tutty was doing first-author research on behalf of children who had just been diagnosed with ADHD, published in the journal that specializes in exactly those children. Everything the critics want you to believe about him has to make room for that fact. It cannot.

In our view, a psychologist who led with the science of helping newly diagnosed kids is a psychologist whose record deserves to be read in full. That is what the record shows. And the record stands.

Editorial note: this profile is drawn exclusively from the published scientific record and public materials. Dr. Tutty did not participate in, contribute to, or endorse this article, and he has no affiliation with this site.