Herbert C. Quay (1929–2019)

Excerpt

Herb Quay died on March 7, 2019, at 91 years of age. Herb’s lasting influence on the field is so basic and profound that, ironically, much of it may be invisible, particularly to younger generations. We all know Herb as the founding Editor of the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology and many of us know that he was the founding President of the International Society for Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology. In founding the journal, he both inspired the study of child psychopathology and gave the small but rapidly growing cadre of scholars in this area a place to publish our papers. It’s hard to credit now, but there was a time when APA journals had little interest in empirical papers on child and adolescent psychopathology. I had the good fortune of attending an editorial meeting of JACP in the 1980s. The members of the editorial board stayed late after the business meeting was over to talk shop and gossip. Herb had the idea to launch ISRCAP to give us a regular venue to continue the conversations. Like the journal, ISRCAP provided the muscle and bones of a vitally important incipient field of research. It only seems like psychopathology research that takes a developmental perspective has always been part of mainstream psychology and psychiatry, but it was not always that way. Herb’s bold and prescient ideas helped kick the field into existence. We all owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude just for those organizational contributions, but of course, Herb was a consummate developmental psychopathologist himself who made innovative, important, and lasting empirical and theoretical contributions to the field. …