Child Psychiatry

Recent clinical research has re-examined various aspects of a wide variety of clinical syndromes. This seems a timely opportunity to review some of this work. In this chapter we tackle three of these themes - hyperactivity, both because it is so topical and because UK and US concepts are beginning to converge; childhood hysteria, which has been relatively neglected, perhaps because clinical diagnoses have tended not to stand up to objective scrutiny; and, finally, the non-psychotic syndromes of social isolation and withdrawal in childhood and adolescence, for we now have a better idea of their boundaries, clinical features, aetiology and prognosis.