This book addresses the most significant and recent issues of infant and child psychiatry, examining topics from clinical care and research perspectives as well as from the perspectives of policies and programmes.

Infant mental health, an emerging discipline, stands at the threshold of momentous advances that illuminate the links between clinical observations and the developing brain of the infant. This book is an invaluable guide to the clinician seeking insight into the relationship of developmental, cognitive, and neuroscience research findings in infant mental health and illness. Significant recent studies reveal the extensive effects of experiences within families and communities on infant development. Varied research topics are reviewed, including fetal sensory responses, infant physiology, and parent-infant speech patterns. The problem of how to implement the cascading information about infants on a broad public-health scale, including topics from international health care strategies to the concept of 'educare', is discussed.
As the first book in The Mentor Series of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions, it is written and edited by the foremost authorities in the field of child and adolescent mental health. It uses multiple levels of conceptualisation, from the infant's response to the feel and smell of a mother's skin, to how clinical knowledge informs broad policies affecting millions of children.
Presented with clarity in a thorough and well-organized fashion to professionals caring for children around the world, The Infant and Family in the Twenty-First Century refines the most significant current knowledge concerning infants and identifies major themes regarding the optimal development of infants and families.

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An exceptional opportunity is being missed. A chance to alleviate suffering and to achieve health care cost reductions for society is available, but is being ignored. There is an explosion of new knowledge about the emotional and intellectual development of children, and the causes and treatment of psychiatric disorders of children and adolescents. Research from diverse disciplines such as the developmental neurosciences, psychoanalysis, psychopharmacology, developmental psychology, and genetics propels us forward,. However, the effects of this new knowledge reach children and adolscents slowly, or not at all. The long history of neglect of the mental health of children and adolescents is now exaggurated by sudden, disruptive economic and political influences on mental health services for children and adolescents in most countries. Prevention and treatment of emotional and intellectual problems in childhood and adolescence have vastly improved, but utilization of these advantages lags behind. This disappointing incongruity stimulates a need to document our knowledge about these services and systems and to make it more broadly available. This is the primary aim of this new volume by a team of distinguished contributors. It reviews the causes and prevalences of psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents, the problem of health care financing for these services, the underutilization of these services, our current understanding of the outcomes of treatment, and the new models for both treatment and prevention. The book also provides a survey of current mental health services and sytems for children and adolescents in countries across the world. Information drawn from these multiple perspectives is has been used by a group of international experts to develop the Venice Declaration, providing specific guidelines for families, clinicians, administrators, and policy-makers who are concerned with the development of children and adolescents, and are committed to a more efficient economic approach to mental health services.