Normal Child and Adolescent Development

Abstract

As child and adolescent psychiatrists, we know that the only way to consistently recognize and understand psychopathology in children and adolescents is to understand and appreciate normal child development; otherwise, the inevitable and frequent variations in normal development may be misinterpreted as pathology. Unfortunately, clinical experiences with children in medical school and residency, whether in general pediatrics or psychiatry, often focus on the diagnosis of pathology. Thus, early in training, residents are left with using personal observations of children and adolescents (often limited and biased) or information from didactics or texts to learn the fundamentals of normal child development. Gemelli, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, former training director, and adjunct professor at the Uniformed Services University in Washington, DC, succeeds in combining developmental facts and theory with clinical material in a manner that is both captivating and highly effective in providing a comprehensive understanding of development. The book's intended audience is the “beginning mental health professional” (p. ix). It is suitable for use as a basic text to supplement didactic and clinical curriculum on typical development; as a thorough, comprehensive, and readable overview of child and adolescent development; or as a series of portraits of typical child and adolescent stages.