PROBLEMS OF DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT: COMMUNICATION BETWEEN PEDIATRICIAN AND PSYCHIATRIST: RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT
We Have Come a long way from the thirties when Brenneman was writing about "The Menace of Psychiatry"1 and Crothers described the confusion of " The Pediatrician in Search of Mental Hygiene."2 On the surface at least we seem to have come to the opposite pole. A pediatrician sits on the Child Psychiatry Committee of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Most teaching services in pediatrics have at least a consultant in child psychiatry, and many hospitals and medical have divisions and departments of child psychiatry closely allied to pediatrics. In the late fifties Dr. Janeway3 as a member of a panel with Anna Freud, said that whereas 25 years ago the presence of a professor of pediatrics on such a platform lent respectability to psychoanalysis, "it now lends respectability to the pediatrician." When, however, one looks below the surface where child psychiatrists and pediatricians function together, mutual dissatisfaction is not infrequent. Probably the pediatricians have more complaints about the psychiatrists than the other way. A frank and critical look at these complaints reveals that they are consistently related to problems in orientation and in understanding each other. On analysis, their differences usually fall into the following relatively few patterns. TYPES OF DISAGREEMENT AND COMMUNICATION DIFFICULTIES A common complaint concerns the communication system, or better, the lack of communication between psychiatrist and pediatrician. Starting sometimes with the differences of professional language, this often goes on to involve the psychiatrist's confidently stated basic assumptions which the pediatrician may refuse to take for granted, or may flatly disbelieve.