Child psychiatry, branch of medicine concerned with the study and treatment of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders of childhood. Child psychiatry has been recognized as a division of the field of psychiatry and neurology since the mid 1920s. By about the mid-1950s, the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology had officially recognized the subspecialty and defined training and certification requirements for it. Subdivisions within the field include infant psychiatry and adolescent psychiatry.
Because the child is living through active and critical phases of development, the approach to the diagnosis and treatment of children’s mental and emotional disturbances is necessarily different from that used with adults. Given the personality changes that occur as a child grows, the child psychiatrist must have extensive knowledge of the developmental stages of personality.
Although many of the general principles relating to the therapy of adult psychological disorders apply to child psychiatry, a major distinction is that the child psychiatrist must obtain much of the critical information about the child’s behaviour from the adults who have been in frequent or close contact with the child—parents, pediatricians, psychologists, teachers, or social workers.
Child psychiatry is primarily concerned with the study and treatment of behavioral disorders and emotional problems that affect children. Emotional maladjustments of children frequently are characterized by anxiety reactions. They may include habit disorders—such as nail-biting, thumb-sucking, bed-wetting, and temper tantrums—and conduct disorders—such as extreme aggressiveness, lying, stealing, destructiveness, fighting, fire setting, cruelty, and running away from home. Among infants, deprivation of mothering or problems in the infant’s relationship with the mother may lead to withdrawn behaviour, continuous crying, inability to eat, insomnia, and physical or mental retardation or both. In the last half of the 20th century, child abuse and neglect came to be seen as significant factors in childhood disorders.
As in the treatment of adult patients, psychiatric treatment of children requires determining any genetic, constitutional, or physical factors that contribute to the disturbance. The parent-child relationship must also be assessed for its contribution to the disturbed behaviour. When parental actions are disruptive or disturbing—as, for example, in relationships coloured by alcoholism, hostility, cruelty, neglect, overprotection of the child, or excessive ambitions for and expectations of the child—behavioral disorders are commonly found in the children involved. Neurotic, psychotic, or psychopathic conditions in the parents often contribute to a faulty parent-child relationship. The death or loss of a parent may also have a lasting effect on a child’s emotional growth. Another source of personality problems may be the child’s relationship with brothers and sisters. Child psychiatry often involves some form of family therapy.
School experiences also can create personality problems. Many children exhibit conduct and learning disturbances because they are emotionally, temperamentally, or intellectually unable to learn. Children with perceptual difficulties such as dyslexia, for example, may fail to learn to read or to develop reading skills appropriate to their age level. As a consequence, they often become frustrated and anxious over their failure to meet the standards of their family and their classmates.
Many therapeutic techniques used with adults are also used with children, in addition to more-specialized methods such as play therapy. In the latter, play activities are used as the primary basis for communication between the child and the psychotherapist. Play activities enable children to express their feelings, thoughts, wishes, and fears more freely and easily than they can through purely verbal communication.