Changing views: New perspectives in child psychiatric research

Research in child and adolescent psychiatry has remarkably changed during the last two decades. In general, there is a strong trend towards empirically based research in all relevant areas, including basic research as well as psychotherapy and prevention. Important contemporary research fields are: epidemiology, developmental psychopathology, family psychopathology, electrophysiology, neuropsychology, genetics, and the application of the new imaging techniques in child psychiatric disorders. Several methods applied in these fields have been developed in non-medical disciplines so that it has been and will be an interdisciplinary task to integrate them into child psychiatry as a medical discipline. New journals, most of them using an interdisciplinary approach, have substantially contributed to the spread of knowledge and have improved the quality of scientific contributions worldwide. Nevertheless, there are also deficits and shortcomings: In general, there is not enough support for research in the field of child psychiatry and developmental psychopathology. In many countries, there is also a deficit with regard to education and training of young researchers. There are not enough positions for senior researchers within departments of child and adolescent psychiatry, and there is also a deficit of research departments in the field without an overload of clinical tasks. However, in many places the given resources are not adequately used, and very often, there is also a lack of interdisciplinary cooperation. Besides these general shortcomings, there are also deficits with regard to conceptualization and evaluation of treatment methods and measures of prevention. To overcome these deficits and shortcomings will be an important task for the future.