Social changes among youth: the United States experience.

The tremendous increase in research on adolescence over the past 20 years, and especially the last decade, has produced a great deal of knowledge about adolescent development and the development of problems during adolescence. This new knowledge should lead to more effective interventions. Although more research is needed on basic developmental processes and context influences, this is especially the case in the area of effective interventions. The next decade may bring significant new knowledge that will dramatically improve the lives of young people in the United States. This is desperately needed as the current status of youth must change.

Child and adolescent psychiatry: toward the twenty-first century.

The history of child and adolescent psychiatry is reviewed, from its beginning in the Hull House movement in Chicago a century ago through subsequent social and scientific transformations. The field's relationships to academic medicine, to progress in the basic sciences, and to child advocacy are described. Current challenges to the field, including the gaps in and barriers to care, the emergence of for-profit enterprises, and the lack of consensus regarding health care regulation, are discussed in terms of the evolving social mission of the profession. Priorities for the next century are identified.