William Yule
Pioneer in treating children who survive wars and disasters
PROFESSOR WILLIAM YULE, who has died aged 83, was one of the world’s leading experts on the effects of trauma on children, and the first professor of applied child psychology in Britain.
As a child psychologist at London’s Institute of Psychiatry, and head of clinical psychology at the Maudsley hospital, Yule challenged the consensus that children were more mentally resilient than adults, and more likely to come through trauma unscathed.
He found that young survivors of the 1987 Zeebrugge ferry disaster could develop post-traumatic stress disorder, with nightmares and flashbacks. He treated children after the King’s Cross Underground fire in 1987 and the sinking of the Marchioness pleasure boat on the Thames in 1989. As an expert witness he was called upon to represent families at inquests.
In 1993 Yule became an adviser to Unicef during the civil war in former Yugoslavia. He set up a training programme in Mostar, teaching local people to run therapeutic services for traumatised children. In Sri Lanka he provided help to children caught up in the civil war, and also in the aftermath of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. In Norway he helped to establish the Children and War Foundation to deploy evidence-based interventions in conflictriven countries.
He provided parents and teachers with training manuals as a “toolbox” to relieve distressing symptoms. Visualisation techniques, often combined with breathing exercises, helped children to moderate anxiety by picturing calming scenes. Auditory symptoms – hearing screams, or sirens – could be dialled down by imagining that the noises were coming from an outside source like a radio. Ultimately, though, traumatised children needed to confront their past: “It’s not coming back to hurt them,” William Yule said, “but if they don’t confront it, they will always fear what might happen.”
He was born in Aberdeen on June 20 1940, the son of Peter, a grocer, and Mary, a mental health nurse. William’s younger sister Myrtle had learning difficulties and psychiatric problems. From grammar school he went to the University of Aberdeen to study maths, switching to psychology in his second year, then took a diploma in clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry (IOP) in London.
In 1964 he moved to the Institute of Education at the University of London, becoming a lecturer in child development under the mentorship of the eminent child psychologist Jack Tizard. He joined a research team led by Michael Rutter, “father of child psychiatry”, whose team was studying children aged nine to 11 on the Isle of Wight; this led to a seminal paper by Rutter on childhood reading difficulties and mental wellbeing.
Returning to the IOP in the late 1960s as a lecturer, Yule set up the Child Traumatic Stress Clinic at the Maudsley.
He wrote more than 350 articles and book chapters, on topics ranging from the effect of lead on children’s development, to phobias (including custard pies and balloons). In 1987 he became Professor of Applied Child Psychology at the IOP, retiring in 2005.
He continued his work with the Children and War Foundation and recently in Ukraine ran workshops for mental health professionals. Though the work could be gruelling, he kept his sense of fun, taking watercolours with him to paint landscapes.
Back home in Camberwell, in a local pantomime he once played an ugly sister alongside Terry Jones.
Yule received a lifetime achievement award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies in 2005, and in 2014 he was named one of Britain’s top 100 practising scientists by the Science Council.
He married, in 1967, Vivien Walters; the marriage was dissolved, and in 1972 he married, secondly, Bridget Osborn, with whom he had two children.