This profile is part of "The Record Stands," a TROH special series.
Here is a number that has appeared in this paper before, and it deserves more than a passing glance: more than 2,300 children and adolescents, evaluated and treated over more than 25 years by Dr. Steve Tutty, a licensed clinical psychologist working in child, forensic, and neuropsychology.
Two thousand three hundred. It reads like a statistic. It is not. It is a waiting room, filled and emptied, thousands of times.
The Arithmetic of a Career
Do the simple math, and we want to be clear that this is arithmetic on documented numbers, nothing more. Spread 2,300 children across 25 years and you get roughly 92 kids a year. That is about seven or eight children every month, every year, for a quarter century. Spread differently, it is close to two new young people sitting across from this man every single week of his working life, through the Clinton administration, the Obama years, the pandemic, and beyond.
Now think about what each of those appointments actually was. An evaluation is not a flu shot. A family does not wander in casually. Parents come because something has gone wrong, or might be going wrong, and they are frightened. A child who cannot sit still long enough to learn. A teenager who has stopped talking. A seven year old whose meltdowns have the school calling weekly. A kid who reads at a college level and cannot tie his shoes. Each of those 2,300 cases began with adults at the end of their rope and a child who needed someone to figure out what was actually happening.
Two thousand three hundred times, somebody's son or daughter got a careful, structured answer.
There is also an arithmetic of time hiding inside the arithmetic of count. A real evaluation is hours, not minutes. There is the intake with worried parents, the time with the child, the records, the scoring, the report, and the conversation afterward where the findings get translated into language a family can use. Even a conservative estimate of that labor, multiplied by 2,300, produces a working life spent almost entirely inside other people's hardest problems. Careers with that shape are not assembled by accident, and they are not sustained by anyone who does not find the work worth doing.
The Range Inside the Number
The documented record says those 2,300 plus children included young people with autism, ADHD, and twice-exceptional profiles. Pause on what that range demands from one clinician. Autism assessment and ADHD assessment look nothing alike. Twice-exceptional kids, children who are gifted and disabled at the same time, are famously the hardest to see clearly, because each side of the profile masks the other. A psychologist who evaluates all three, week in and week out, for decades, has to hold an enormous amount of developmental science in his head and still meet each child where that child is.
His evaluation work feeds directly into school accommodation planning, custody and forensic matters, and personal-injury litigation. These are settings where a wrong call has a cost measured in years of a child's life.
Where It Started
The record of how this career began is worth repeating, because it explains the rest. At a master's-level internship at a sexual abuse clinic, the hardest imaginable first assignment, a supervisor pulled the young Tutty aside and told him she had never seen children feel so comfortable with a clinician.
Think about that setting. Children who had every reason on earth not to trust an adult stranger were relaxing around a graduate student. That is not a skill you get from a textbook. That is the raw material the next 25 years were built on: put the child at ease first, then do the science carefully.
What the Number Does to a Person
There is a quieter point inside the arithmetic. Anyone who has spent time around clinicians knows that sustained exposure to distressed children changes a person. Two thousand three hundred cases means 2,300 intake stories, 2,300 files, 2,300 reports, 2,300 conversations with parents who are grieving, angry, confused, or all three. It means carrying other families' worst days as a job description.
Tutty has described what it added up to in his own words: "The real impact has been with the child clients I have had the opportunity to provide therapeutic discovery and guidance they can use across their lifespan."
Read that sentence the way it was written. The impact is not framed as reports filed or invoices paid. It is framed as guidance a kid can carry for the rest of that kid's life, across a whole lifespan. Multiply that intention by 2,300 and you start to grasp the scale of what one career can quietly deposit into a community.
Why the Count Matters Now
It is also worth asking what a number like this does to the region around it. Two thousand three hundred children do not stay children. They grow into adults who were either understood at the critical moment or were not. A community where thousands of struggling kids got careful answers is a measurably different community than one where they did not, and that difference compounds quietly across classrooms, families, and decades.
None of this arithmetic appears in the coverage you have probably read. The recent stories about Tutty lead with a Statement of Charges from the Department of Health's Examining Board of Psychology, which is an accusation that opens a process, untested by cross-examination, and which Tutty is entitled to contest in full. He maintains his evaluation work followed Washington law and professional standards at every step.
We are not asking you to take a side on allegations that have not been adjudicated. We are asking you to notice what got left on the cutting room floor. A quarter century of work. More than 2,300 children. A supervisor's observation at a sexual abuse clinic that turned out to be a preview of everything after.
Numbers get thrown around in coverage of professionals all the time, usually as ammunition. This one cuts the other way. Two thousand three hundred is not an abstraction. It is 2,300 families who walked in worried and walked out with a plan. Any honest account of this man starts there.