This volume is a collection of sixteen original papers devoted to The Prevention of Mental Disorders in Children—the theme for the Fourth International Congress of Child Psychiatry to be held in Holland during the summer of 1962. The authors concern themselves with primary prevention, defined as 'the promotion of mental health and the lowering of the risk of mental disorder in a population of children by interfering with pathogenic forces within the children and their biologic, psychologic, and social environment before the appearance of identifiable pathology'.

Three of the papers attribute a wide range of neuropsychiatric disturbances, such as mental deficiency, cerebral palsy, reading disabilities, and tics, to various prenatal and perinatal factors like nutrition, physical illness, and birth injury. Pasamanick and Knobloch, in one of these papers, offer the interesting but questionable