To Andreas Warnke, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Head of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, to celebrate his professional life and work at the occasion of his 65th anniversary

Abstract

This special issue is dedicated to a prodigious child and adolescent psychiatrist who has always truly cared for the well-being of his young patients regarding their situation from a holistic point of view. After his education in Montenegro, Brazil, and Frankfurt, Germany, Andreas Warnke not only studied human medicine but also psychology at the Universities of Giesen and Marburg and obtained his doctorate of human medicine in 1977. Primarily, he practised as a psychologist starting his child and adolescent psychiatry career at the Max-Planck-Institute at Munich in 1979, which he successfully continued at the University Clinic of Marburg (1983), where he became a Professor in 1989. Since 1991, he has been the head of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Wuerzburg. Over the following decade, he was able to win over local social institutions and politicians and has extended and expanded his clinic by setting up a huge multi-professional out-patients’ department, a beautiful day-clinic and an ultra-modern intense care unit. A highly specialized centre for mentally handicapped children and adolescents with psychiatric disorders will be opened during the next year. Despite his leading position and his numerous management tasks, he has never lost the kindness and warmth towards his patients and their families. Moreover, it has always been one of his most important issues to politically cement the relevance and esteem of child and adolescent psychiatry, psychosomatics and psychotherapy in professional and everyday life. Thus, he has been recognized and admired personally within managing boards of several leading committees such as the ‘‘Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Kinderund Jugendpsychiatrie’’ (DGKJP), the Committee of the German guidelines for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the European Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) and the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions (IACAPAP) to name only a few. Since 2008, Andreas Warnke has been the president of the association ‘‘World Federation of Attention Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)’’ founded in Zurich, Switzerland. Andreas Warnke has also been active on numerous journal editorial boards such as the ‘‘Zeitschrift fur Kinderund Jugendpsychiatrie und Psychotherapie’’, which is the most important child and adolescent psychiatric journal in Germany and for which he was the editorin-chief, the ‘‘Journal of Neural Transmission’’ and the recently founded journal ‘‘ADHD Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders’’. Finally, he has organized many successful congresses and initiated innovative congress categories such as in 1993 the ‘‘Arbeitskreis Biologische Kinderund Jugendpsychiatrie’’, which was the first annual meeting for researchers of biological child and adolescent psychiatry in Germany, in 1996 the ‘‘Arzt-Lehrer-Tagung’’, an interdisciplinary meeting of school teachers and child and adolescent psychiatrists and in 1998 the ‘‘Wurzburger Fachtagung Kinderund Jugendpsychiatrie C. Mehler-Wex (&) University of Ulm, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Ulm, Germany e-mail: claudia.mehler-wex@uniklinik-ulm.de