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This volume offers the readers a comprehensive overview of child and adolescent psychiatry in its broadest sense. Psychiatry in previous decades often ignored the efforts of experimental child psychology as being academically removed from the clinical world of signs, symptoms, and family psychopathology. This volume belies that assumption in depth and breadth, as it offers “a thorough and a complete summary of current issues and perspectives about anxiety disorders in children …” Each chapter summarizes a basic issue thoroughly, and thus, the text offers various perspectives that can deepen the clinician's understanding of children who show anxiety.
For example, the first chapter by Trefers and Silverman traces thoroughly how the thinking and practices relevant to anxiety in children developed over the centuries prior to the twentieth century. Hippocrates wrote about the illness of infants and children and included fear and night terrors, and almost 2000 years passed before “… anxiety in children would again come to be regarded as an illness.”
Educational resources in the Middle Ages focused on childhood anxiety in books of nurture, including isolated descriptions of disorders that included school refusal. The church, serving as the caregiver of children in the Middle Ages, utilized different saints in different regions to be patrons of illnesses, for example, epilepsy.
By the nineteenth century, anxiety tended to be viewed as vulnerability, and the latter half of the century witnessed more differentiation of the causes of psychiatric problems of children, such as heredity (temperament), drunkenness of parents and obstetric complications. The authors also discuss the historical context of classification, of treatment, and of contributions from psychology and other sciences, including the influence of Darwin, Binet, and Hall. The latter invited Freud in 1909 to lecture in the United States and that year marked the publication of “Little Hans.”
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