Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
Children and adolescents live through multiple periods of critical, sometimes chaotic, development affecting the ways they think, feel, and perceive. Biologically and genetically, they are in flux. It is vital that approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions are different from those adopted with adults.
The Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry is world-renowned for its progressive research in this field. Our goal is to understand in principle how childhood disorders are distinct from their adult equivalents. We then apply those principles to prevention, diagnosis and treatment - specifically designed with development in mind.
Areas of expertise:
-
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
-
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
-
Mental Disorders in Intellectual Disability
-
Affective Disorders (Anxiety and Depression)
-
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder & Related Disorders
-
Deliberate Self-Harm
-
Eating Disorders
-
Parenting and Antisocial Behaviour
-
Conduct Disorder
We provide the essential link between state-of-the-art science and its translation into clinical services, strengthened by our pivotal role within King’s Health Partners and our staff’s myriad connections with the National Specialist teams based at the Maudsley Hospital. The Department is also home to the National Academy of Parenting Research.
The Department is the focus for the Child Mental Disorders theme within the Biomedical Research Centre (funded by the National Institute for Health Research), and is headed by Professor Emily Simonoff.