Child Psychiatry
There once was a time when children were merely seen as little adults. When this view of adolescence began to change, child psychiatry was formed.
If you were to study poems, books, and paintings from the early 1800s, you would discover that children were treated as “little people,” and they were expected to behave as adults. During this time, there was no distinct difference between a child and an adult, and society treated children in the exact same manner that adults were treated. This type of treatment extended to the expectation of children to be accountable for their actions (many children were jailed or hanged), and adults also believed that children were capable of comprehending scenarios as adults would. Thankfully, when a psychiatrist by the name of Manheimer published the work “Les Troubles Mentaux de L’Enfance,” the world began to see children, and child psychiatry, in a different light.
Though Manheimer paved the way for later psychiatrists, the most notable psychiatrist that dealt with children was Moritz Tramer. Tramer was the original founder of the Zeitschrift fur Kinderpsychiatrie, which later turned into Acta Paedopsychiatria. It seemed a difficult concept for many to grasp – the mere thought that adolescence was an altogether different stage of life seemed bizarre – leading to much criticism regarding the true inner workings of a child’s mind.
Around the year 1935, Leo Kanner published a book within the United States called “child psychiatry.” This book was both eye opening and shocking to those that never knew children were any different, and Kanner’s book still remains largely used as reference for students today. Though Kanner was the first to really coin this term within North America, Charles Bradley (a neuropsychiatrist) began medicating children with mental illnesses prior to Kanner’s book. Of course, the mental disorders of Kanner and Bradley’s time were slightly different from the ones that we study today.
Since this field was relatively new during the 1930s, many children were institutionalized due to behavior that (we now know) is rather common for a child. A vast majority of children were medicated, subjected to various forms of “treatment,” and then left to wilt away behind the bars of some mental hospital. This only caused other children to act more “adult-like” in order to avoid a horrific fate, which really began the cycle of children acting as adults all over again.
Though the history of child psychiatry is not what one would call “chipper,” it is a history all the same. This field has really made leaps and bounds of the past few decades, and today it is a respected form of mental health.