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Almost two decades before Kanner's and Asperger's works, the original paper by child psychiatrist Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva had already been written. It was published in 1926 by Sukhareva in a German scientific journal of psychiatry and neurology, with a detailed description of children who presented clinical conditions whose characteristics and evolution closely resemble autism, according to current criteria. In the present historical note, we intend to present Sukhareva's pioneering work and retrieve the meaning of her original contribution., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflict of interest to declare., (The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).)

Today, there is evidence that shows that children and adolescents can experience developmental problems and psychiatric disorders. This was possible because of two main reasons, the evolution of the concept of infancy and the progress made in medical and psychiatric diagnostic classification. This manuscript offers a glance to early psychiatric attention in Mexico, particularly the care processes provided to 36 children and adolescents under twenty, admitted in the mental asylum La Castañeda, during the first half of the XX century. Admission causes, length of stay, diagnosis, treatment and discharge motives, are some of the aspects described in this study. Finally, it also reflects about the challenge it is for a child psychiatric hospital nowadays, with such a history, to become an innovative institution able to claim a place in the medical field in favor of those minors that can barely defend themselves.

Background: Dutch child- and adolescent psychiatry (cap) is going through a complex phase now that the Youth Law has decreed that cap is to be placed under control of the municipality (i.e. local government) instead of the national government., Aim: To explain and discuss this development from a historical perspective., Method: Information was obtained from historical sources., Results: The municipality, i.e. local government, has played an important role in parts of youth mental health since the beginning of the 20th century. In the 1980s, however, governance was transferred to the national government, only to be passed back to the municipality in the early years of the 21st century., Conclusion: The level of governance, be it local or national, can bring both advantages and disadvantages to the youth mental health services. Up till now there have been several transfers from one level of governance to the other. It would be better if the two levels of governance were combined and the various parts controlled by a combination of the most appropriate types of governance.

Background: Nowadays Sabine Spielrein is remembered primarily because of her very early work (directly influenced by Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung) or because of her 'amour fou' with Jung. As a result, we tend to forget her role as a pioneer of child psychiatry and psychology and as a contributor to child analysis and play therapy., Aim: To cast new light on Spielrein as a forgotten pioneer of child psychiatry., Method: A review of the primary and secondary literature., Results: The one-sided depiction of Spielrein and her work in the secondary literature has been corrected. Starting from her initial interest in psychoanalysis, the multifaceted Spielrein evolved towards developmental and experimental research. Spielrein's importance lies with her pioneers role and her contribution to the developing (integrative) child psychiatry., Conclusion: Spielrein's largely forgotten work can be seen as a prefiguration of integrative child psychiatry.

This article examines the British child guidance movement's claim to scientific status and what it sought to gain by the wider acceptance of such a claim. The period covered is from the movement's origins in the 1920s to the end of the Second World War, by which point it had been incorporated into the welfare state. This was also an era when science commanded high intellectual and cultural status. Child guidance was a form of psychiatric medicine that addressed the emotional and psychological difficulties that any child might experience. It thus saw itself as a form of preventive medicine and as a component of the international movement for mental hygiene. Child guidance was organized around the clinic and employed the knowledge and skills of three distinct professions: psychiatrists, psychologists and psychiatric social workers. Its claim to scientific status was underpinned by the movement's clinical and organizational approach and in turn derived from developments in the laboratory sciences and in academic medicine. There were, however, those even within the movement itself who challenged child guidance's purported scientific status. Such objections notwithstanding, it is suggested here that at least in its own terms the claim was justified, particularly because of the type of psychiatric approach which child guidance employed, based as it was on a form of medical holism.

Background: This article reviews the older Dutch literature on what is now known as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)., Method: Because this older literature is not included in electronic databases, it was traced, in a systematic and a selective manner, by means of bibliographic references., Results: It is often assumed that ADHD is a purely Anglo-Saxon phenomenon that was introduced into The Netherlands along with the concept of MBD (minimal brain damage). This assumption is incorrect. In fact, ADHD has had quite a long, respectable history of its own in The Netherlands (and in surrounding countries). The antecedents of ADHD were regarded as very common phenomena. Over the years these concepts have often been the subject of considerable controversy. Biological factors were thought to be important in the etiology., Conclusion: It would be wrong to regard ADHD only as a fashionable ailment originating in the age of computers and working mothers. Equally untenable is the current view that pre-DSM III child psychiatrists attributed psychiatric disorders solely to parental influences ('parent-blaming'). The same conclusion was drawn in other publications by the author. The history of ADHD thus demonstrates that, contrary to general belief, early psychiatry in The Netherlands was more balanced and many-sided.

Mental health professionals intent on leaving their mark on juvenile justice and committed to behaviour modification forged a partnership with Toronto's Juvenile Court during the 1920s. However, the routine practice of the court did not allow for intensive investigation of juvenile offenders or for careful study of the causes of delinquency. Conferences started in 1925 by W. E. Blatz bridged this gap by offering a number of advantages that could not be realized under the court's busy routine. Taking charge of a limited number of offenders permitted psychiatrists to more thoroughly examine special cases such as recidivists, intensely debate treatment strategies, more carefully supervise individual cases, and test their theories about the causes of juvenile crime. Conference case files reveal that psychiatrically informed strategies of regulation were a novel way to respond to deviance and that gender-specific understandings of, and strategies for, appropriate conduct also served to reproduce prevailing ideals for working-class boys and girls. With clear ideas about appropriate conduct for girls and boys, mental health professional attempted to create such standards in the delinquents whose cases appeared before them.

Nic (Caroline) Waal (1905-60) is said to be the mother of Norwegian child and adolescent psychiatry. She was an engaged and engaging personality, outgoing, at times aggressive and at the same time very sensitive. Her sensitivity caused her suffering but it was an asset in her work with patients. She qualified in medicine in Oslo in 1930 and received her psychoanalytic training in Berlin and Oslo. She was certified as a psychoanalyst in 1933, as a psychiatrist in 1951 and--among the first in Norway--as a child psychiatrist in 1953. From 1953 till her untimely death in 1960 she was head of Nic Waal's Institute, a treatment centre and training institute for all child psychiatric professions. Through the training she provided and her published work she has had considerable influence on the development of child psychiatry in Norway and in Scandinavia. She also developed her own method of psychodiagnosis through the study of patients' pattern of muscular tensions. Her institute is still active and expanding, having included family therapy and neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry.

In Swedish child and adolescent psychiatry there is a more than 60-year long tradition of using longitudinal methods in research on juvenile delinquency. Since the 1940's, results have been presented using either prospective or retrospective longitudinal designs for this purpose. Starting from genetics as scientific paradigm, new approaches including neuropsychiatry and social psychiatry showed the need for a multidisciplinary view at the border between medicine and behavioral sciences. Both Swedish and international research in the area has clearly demonstrated that factors relating to gender, maturation, resilience vs. vulnerability, the mental health of the parents, the social network and the organization of the school are of importance when trying to understand, prevent and treat juvenile delinquents. The challenge presented to today's and future researchers is to understand how the complexity of the modern western society will impact already established knowledge.

Created in the early 1920s, at a moment when the country's psychiatric field was embracing the preventive outlook, the Liga Brasileira de Higiene Mental included within its members the elite of Brazilian psychiatry, along with a number of physicians and intellectuals. The article discusses the institution's proposals for intervention among children. The league ended up incorporating into its theoretical arsenal the basic themes of mental hygiene and eugenics as part of its general goal of collaborating in Brazil's process of "racial sanitation". With this objective in mind, and viewing the child as a "pre-citizen" who is a "fundamental part within the man of the future", league members included the children's issue in their projects and saw an imperative need for mental health care from early ages on.

This article describes the interplay of various interests in centre-based child care from the 1930s to the late 1960s, through an examination of the development of a treatment centre for children with autism at the West End Creche in Toronto. The impact of the attention to child care during World War II in North America is described in relation to the postwar trend to reorient child care away from a service for wage-earning mothers and towards an educational-therapeutic service for children and families. The role of local and international welfare associations, as well as the influence of the interrelated professions of child psychiatry, social work, and nursery education, is reviewed. Finally, implications for current developments in the field of early childhood education are discussed.

The introduction explains that the purpose of the Monograph is not to present a systematic history of child development in this country, which has been done by others, but rather to enrich portions of the record with individual accounts and reactions to personal experiences. It then proceeds to a discussion of the value, and pitfalls, of oral history for those who probe the past. The body of the Monograph necessarily is confined to certain areas and to a limited number of people who were interviewed, since hundreds of pages of transcripts representing some 80 people have been amassed. With a view to the widest possible coverage of materials in the tapes, three major topics are developed: (1) the reactions of people who have worked in child development to some of the major figures and influences in the field during the careers, (2) the relationship of the study of child development to pediatrics and child psychiatry through the years as viewed by various scientists in a position to hold opinions worth hearing, (3) the relevance of the child development movement to better child care practices in the United States. In this last section, questions of whether it is desirable to gear research to matters of social relevance and whether it is possible-or advisable-given the present state of knowledge for scientists to provide answers in planning for children are considered from vastly differing viewpoints. Also the related problem of the protection of research from misrepresentation by those who want a headline or have biases to buttress is briefly touched on in this section. The conclusion presents various viewpoints as to the appropriateness of the word "movement" as a description of what has taken place in child development. In that connection the Society for Research in Child Development is discussed, as are also the difficulties, encountered by the field in general and by the institutes in particular, which impeded the whole effort.