in costruzione

riprendo da un mio intervento in Medscape, riservandomi di tradurlo dal mio maccheronico inglese e estenderlo in un secondo momento.

As a child psychiatrist since 1977, if I look at what changed in my way of seeing children mental health problems, I think it is the growing of the concept of 'developmental disorders' and the distinction between (in ICD 10) F80-F89 'Dysorders of psychological development' and F90 - F98 'Behavioural and emotional disorders with onset in childhood and adolescence' - as distincted items from adults categories. At age of my beginnings, it was usual to consider fixed categories (derived from adult psychiatry) also in child psychiatry. The basic distinction became then that between 'development disorder' and 'function disorder'.
With these conceptual tools in child psychiatry we have the possibility to see the development of a disfunction, while in adult psychiatry usually one can see only the effects of previous disorders of mental functions.
I think that changed a lot of things in looking at mental health issues in children, as situations where development may be disturbed by some causes. So we can try to research the causes of those disorders and do appropriate interventions.
I have the impression, as I said many times, that psychiatric research is intended only as 'biological research', as if the enviroment where we live had no effect. I think we need researches on links between enviromental variables and psychic development, but also to have improved methods to appreciate enviroment variables, that are not only social ones or grossly visible ones. I think this would be 'epidemiologic research' in mental health, distint from clinical research dr Ghaemy writes about (if I understand well).
The separation between child psychiatry and adult psychiatry was useful in order to permit to see many thing in their development. The advent of biochemistry model in adult mental health was then applied again to children, with the effect to reduce still once the child psychiatry to a dependence of adult models.