Early Child Psychiatry in Britain

Abstract

This chapter surveys work in the history of child psychiatry to offer a history of early child psychiatry in Britain and suggest future research directions. It is intended as a general overview and as a guide to those embarking on research in this field. Accounting for the development of child psychiatry as a discipline reveals a deep and complex root network drawing from children’s medicine, child guidance, psychoanalysis, education, social work, hospital psychiatry, and other institutional settings, necessitating a broad interpretation of “child psychiatry” to include the many theories and practices that took as their object the understanding and management of the child’s mind. The gathering of practices under the “Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services” (CAMHS) umbrella in the late twentieth century belies an enduring eclecticism that has been a consistent feature of child psychiatric theory, practice, and research in Britain. Across the period, children and childhood – both as empirical realities and as analytical categories – have posed particular questions to psychiatry and mental health care, especially in their ostensible vulnerability, liminality, and inaccessibility. Historians have approached this complex history by framing their analyses around specific psychiatric theories or hypotheses, prominent individuals or groups of practitioners, particular institutions, and the construction of diagnostic categories and disease subjects. These investigations have utilized case files, institutional records, past research and discussion papers, legislation and policy documents, oral history, and methods from a range of academic fields. The mind of the child remains a contested entity at the center of contemporary social issues, and the history of child psychiatry has a role to play in promoting children’s welfare in the present and future.