Lancet obituary George C Patton | Centre for Adolescent Health

Child and adolescent psychiatrist, psychiatric epidemiologist, and global leader in adolescent health. Born on Dec 31, 1954, in Melbourne, VIC, Australia, he died of gastric cancer on Dec 7, 2022, in Melbourne, aged 67 years.

George Patton elevated the field of adolescent health, bringing the needs of adolescents to the world’s attention and identifying interventions that could improve their lives. As the Director of Adolescent Health Research at the Royal Children’s Hospital’s Centre for Adolescent Health (CAH), with academic appointments at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) and the University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia, he was a global leader in this field, including as Chair of the influential 2016 Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing. Patton’s pivotal research “enabled people to appreciate the significance of adolescence in the life course”, said Susan Sawyer, Professor of Adolescent Health at the University of Melbourne and the Director of the CAH, as well as Patton’s wife. Patton was a “true leader in every sense of the word. He was wise, thoughtful, generous with his advice, and remarkable in terms of bringing together very different people”, said Peter Azzopardi, Co-Head of Global Adolescent Health at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne.

Patton graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery in 1978. He moved to the UK to train in psychiatry and epidemiology at London’s Royal Free Hospital, while pursuing a higher degree in the epidemiology of adolescent eating disorders. Through various posts in the UK and Germany, he became fascinated with adolescence. Returning to Melbourne, he joined the CAH in 1991 and took up academic appointments as a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at the Royal Children’s Hospital and a Senior Lecturer in Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne. He would become CAH’s Director in 1997 and Director of Adolescent Health Research in 2004. Shortly after arriving at CAH, Patton established the Victorian Adolescent Health Cohort Study (VAHCS). “The real beating heart of who he was was forged over many decades studying young people in their development”, said Craig Olsson, Professor in Lifecourse Epidemiology at the Centre for Adolescent Health at MCRI and the Centre for Social and Early Emotional Development at Deakin University, VIC, Australia. Patton “enjoyed the breadth of the canvas” VAHCS offered, Sawyer said, “particularly to research pubertal timing and the shape of puberty and how that influences adolescent mental health, as well as a wider set of behaviours including substance use and sexual and reproductive health”. Patton also “did pioneering work around whole-school interventions and the effects of enriching the secondary school environment for teenagers, that was well ahead of its time”, Olsson said.

Patton joined WHO’s Technical Steering Committee in what was then the Department of Child and Adolescent Health in 2003 and was soon shifting global discussions about adolescent health. In collaboration with WHO, his leadership of the world’s first analysis of adolescent mortality data “was critical to moving the perception of adolescent health as only having relevance for high-income countries to one that recognised the significance of adolescence as a period within the life course that was of equal relevance to the Global South”, Sawyer said. The 2016 Lancet Commission was “hugely significant” said Sawyer and helped to shape the global agenda on adolescent health.

Patton was “very tenacious, very intelligent, and very committed…to letting the data speak in the most unbiased, the most pure way the data could speak to us”, Olsson said. He was also devoted to collaboration and skilled at building consensus. “Chairing many research networks, he had this incredible ability to hone in on the critical points of any discussion, while already framing the next questions to ask,” Sawyer said. Crucially, he forged these connections across myriad disciplines. “His legacy is this new world of adolescent health and wellbeing research that draws on multidisciplinary, multicultural, and multigenerational perspectives—research that sets forth a call to action”, said Sarah Baird, Professor of Global Health and Economics in the Department of Global Health at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, USA. In addition to Sawyer, Patton is survived by his mother, Yvonne, his children, Susannah, Thomas, Imogen, and Jonathan, and a grandson. A thoughtful mentor, Sawyer said Patton “inspired a big generation of doctoral students and postdocs. He really was in this position of being incredibly influential, with his searing intelligence, his wisdom, and his strategic smarts, all embodied in this very humble, kind man.”

Published: December 22, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)02592-2