The status of prevention in the education of child psychiatrists.

While the pioneers of modern child psychiatry focused much of their attention on prevention, the situation today is markedly different. A questionnaire survey of child psychiatric residency programs suggests that when attention is devoted to prevention in the education of child psychiatrists, it is often ambiguous, haphazard, and minimal. This impelled the authors to sample the current status of available knowledge about preventive child psychiatry with an assessment of the validity of the knowledge and its potential utility. These are followed by some suggestions for child psychiatric education.