Who needs to see the psychiatrist?

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In the past 13 years I have had referred to me some 2600 new patients and have undertaken some 10 400 psychothera peutic sessions with these children, usually with both their parents, and not infrequently with the rest of the family as well. My analysis brought to light no euphoric children. Child and adolescent psychiatry is quite different from adult psychia try. Children do not suffer from schizophrenia, paraphrenia, paranoid psychoses, mania, sexual neuroses, arteriosclerotic dementia, or chronic alcoholism. They do, however, suffer from various emotional conflicts?from fears, phobias, forms of hysteria, boredom, frustration, suppression, shame, humiliation, feelings of rejection (often justified), temper tantrums, feelings of inadequacy and of vulnerability, self-consciousness, and varying degrees of unhappincss up to utter despair and a wish that they could die; just the same feelings as normal adults, in fact, although their vocabulary limits their ability to express themselves. Being a child is hard, much harder than being an adult. Children are utterly dependent on adults for their bare survival, let alone their civil liberties. The well-adjusted child must be