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When Erika Schmidt spoke about the mental health of children, her passionate insistence on solutions to the ways in which they were failed by social attitudes and structures inevitably found voice:
If the pandemic has been an object lesson in the importance of mental health care, we should inscribe the following: a child has a right to a sound developmental trajectory and, if that trajectory is derailed for any reason, a child has a right to mental health services that help them to be back on the rails, to acquire psychological resources and emotional well-being. (Schmidt, 2023, p. 286)
Erika believed that medication was overused and that therapy too often focused on changing behavior rather than understanding its meaning. In the years we worked together on the PsiAN Children’s Committee, she often summarized this by saying the goal of child treatment was to create good citizens. By this, she meant helping children to develop the capacity for emotional regulation, to recognize humanity in others, and to engage in caring and loving relationships and socially constructive work. I found this perspective simple, clear, and arresting in its unpsychological language – like so many of Erika’s opinions.
The collection of articles you find here embodies Erika’s understanding of mental health and its connection to our experience in the world. It illustrates her conviction that therapies of depth, insight, and relationship can free up patients’ forward development, which is movement toward becoming good citizens in the world – even though none of the articles speak directly about children. In fact, what’s needed by children is needed also by those of us who have grown beyond childhood. What’s good for society is that all people have the opportunity to “get back on the rails” – or to locate rails, after the dislocation of traumatic experience, upon which people of all ages, races, countries of origin and economic condition can move forward in their capacities. What’s good for org