Neurobiological research in child and adolescent psychiatry: does the pendulum swing back to more attention on developmental psychopathology?

Abstract

not preclude the necessity to define reliable diagnostic criteria in daily clinical routine as well as clear and clinically relevant disorder categories" [4]. Already in 1999, Berrios [1] sent a message condensed in the title of his article "Towards a new descriptive psychopathology: a sine qua non for neurobiological research in psychiatry". But while psychopathology had an undisputed role as an important clinical and research tool over decades, it took more and more a backseat in the recent two decades that are characterized by increasing influence of operationalized psychiatric diagnoses, evidence-based guidelines and neuroscientific considerations on the identity of psychiatric disorders. Some opinion leaders even argued that psychopathology will sooner or later be fully replaced by neuroscientific concepts [5].But taking into account that these problems with neurobiological findings may very well result from poor psychopathological standards or from insufficient or misleading operational diagnostic entities, one of the neurobiological answers to this challenge could be the idea of 'functional psychopathology', trying to develop correlative or causal links not between nosological entities and neurobiological findings, but between the latter and psychopathologically defined syndromes [5].The present issue of ECAP is a prototypic picture of these developments. Only 1 [7] out of 11 child and adolescent psychiatric studies present neurobiological results to the readership. Its finding that GRIN2B variants predict children with the worst outcome in attention functioning among children exposed to low SES follows the research strategies proposed by some of the admonishers of a preponderance of neurobiological research.Particularly in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry, the above-mentioned idea of 'functional psychopathology' should be extended to 'developmental At the turn of the millennium, Berrios [1] as one of the first authors published a statement regarding the upcoming disenchantment with progress in psychiatry in terms of neurobiological research findings. He described three waves of enthusiastic hope for the understanding of mental disorders triggered by the introduction of new powerful research techniques: during the nineteenth century in relation to optical microscopy and neuropathology, during the twentieth century in relation to EEG, psychopharmacology, air ventriculography and CAT scan and during the last decade (i.e. 1990s) in relation to neuroimaging (e.g., MRT, MEG), computer-and electronic-based neuropsychology and molecular genetics. But he, like others in the following years [2,4,5], criticized the predominance of the indeed fascinating high-tech research with the consequence of "attracting all the research monies and in creating many an academic reputation; and also noxious in that they effectively condemned clinicians as fuddy-duddies" [1]. This critique is fueled inter alia by the increasing and in 2011 "…almost unmanageable number of neuroimaging studies with different single findin...

What happened to the concept of adolescence crisis?

“…Hence, we would like to propose a more differentiated view on adolescence psychiatry following our editorial from 2015 "Neurobiological research in child and adolescent psychiatry: does the pendulum swing back to more attention on developmental psychopathology?" [21]. The idea of an "adolescence crisis" wants to stress the notion that in adolescents, there are manifold impairments in psychosocial functioning, but these are not necessarily associated with an emerging psychiatric disorder, or at least, we do not know yet.…”