William Healy (psychiatrist)

William Healy (January 20, 1869 – March 15, 1963) was a British-American psychiatrist and criminologist who started the earliest American child guidance clinic, was a pioneer of psychoanalysis in the United States, and served as the American Orthopsychiatric Association's founding president.

Early life and education William Healy was born in Buckinghamshire, England on January 20, 1869. He came from a family of farmers who had resided for generations in Farnham Commons of Beaconsfield, twenty-five miles northwest of London. When he was nine, his family immigrated to the United States, settling in Chicago where Healy spent the remainder of his childhood.

At fourteen, before finishing eighth grade, Healy began working as an office boy at a bank. The small bank was somewhat of a "cultural storehouse" with employees that ranged from Shakespearean scholars and poets to musical conductors. Over the next ten years, Healy became head "bookkeeper" before applying to Harvard. In 1917, Healy was invited to Boston by Judge Frederick Pickering Cabot and his associates, to head the Judge Baker Foundation, a similar institution for juvenile research. In 1924, Healy aided in founding the American Orthopsychiatric Association; he also served as the president from 1924 to 1926.

Personal life In 1901, Healey married his first wife Mary Tenney, whom he had met through Hull House circles. They had one son named Kent Tenney Healy. Mary Tenney Healy died in 1932 after a long illness. Healy died in Clearwater, Florida in 1963.

Selected publications The Individual Delinquent (1915) Delinquents and Criminals: Their Making and Unmaking (1926), with Augusta Bronner New Light on Delinquency (1936), with Augusta Bronner Roots of Crime: Psychoanalytic Studies (1936), with Franz Alexander