A child psychiatry chairman's view

The Yale Child Study Center at Yale University School of Medicine is a model of how the responsibilities and opportunities of an independent department of child psychiatry can be meshed. An independent academic department can sustain the momentum of multidisciplinary research, clinical services, and training associated with advances in the field of child psychiatry. These advances include the systematic description and evaluation of healthy child development; model clinical services in the community, schools, and hospital; and in-depth understanding of autism, Tourette's syndrome, and obsessive-compulsive disorders.