I suppose that it is true that there is a “crisis in youth mental health?” I am never quite sure that this is not simply a result of my growing older, and of people in general being more aware of the effects of mental and emotional problems. Certainly from my own personal observation I am worried about coping with a depressed daughter, and a teenaged foster‐son from a very disturbed background facing pressures that were unimaginable in my teenage years. As an available and more or less sympathetic ear I regularly find myself in conversation with slightly older young people who have embarked on masters degrees because they did not know what else to do with their lives or who have started on PhDs and have suddenly realised what a lonely life it can be as a research student, and I seem to face an ever‐increasing stream of professional customers looking for books like this one. If there is not actually a crisis there is definitely sufficient growth of interest to justify libraries acquiring books on the subject.
Child psychiatry is a relatively recently developed field. As far as I can gather, up until the early stages of the last century, children were basically regarded as small adults, and the only treatment for most behavioural disorders was a savage beating. Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna, and Melanie Klein, extended his psychoanalytic ideas to children, but child psychiatry really kicked off seriously in the 1920s, with the establishment of child guidance clinics in Boston and in the east end of London. Adolescence seems to have been a rather later invention, being brought into the mental health fold via studies of delinquency – until fairly recently in historical terms teenagers did not really exist at all. Now there is an enormous and growing literature on the subject, taking up bays of shelves in my library, and including a number of massive comprehensive textbooks. The doyen of these is probably Rutter and Taylor (2002), which I would recommend as a first choice, and we have just ordered the new edition of Cicchetti and Cohen (2006) in three massive volumes, which would probably be my second choice. For junior doctors cramming for their membership examinations the Royal College of Psychiatrists have recently produced a new edition in their seminars series (Gowers, 2005) which libraries catering for clinicians will want to have.
The four volumes under review form a worthy addition to this growing literature. They consist of 42 concise chapters, written entirely by American clinicians and aimed entirely at an American readership, which may limit their relevance to readers in other countries but, as far as childhood mental disorders go, anything that happens in America is likely to happen in other developed countries fairly soon, so this should not matter too much. The target readership is clearly the junior clinician or at least the very well informed lay reader, so these volumes may be slightly out of scope for the average public library, though still worth considering. Clinical medical and nursing libraries should consider buying this, probably as an addition to their lending stock, rather than as a core reference book. I am sure that it will be regularly borrowed from my library. Mental disorders in young people are increasingly impacting on teachers and social workers, so libraries catering for these groups might also wish to look at it.
