The Etiology of Conduct Disorders

Abstract

In the opening chapter of this book, I outlined several principles that guide an applied-science approach to treating children and adolescents with conduct disorders. One principle is that intervention should be based on a clear understanding of why some individuals engage in serious patterns of antisocial and aggressive behaviors. This link between research and practice allows for the design of interventions that attempt to remove or reduce these causal factors or, if this is not possible, to minimize the harmful effects of these causal influences. Therefore, understanding the causal processes that underlie conduct disorders is not just a scientific exercise but a critically important endeavor to the practicing clinician. Unfortunately, understanding the development of conduct disorders is also a very complex process for a number of reasons.