Child and adolescent psychiatry: the need for training and development.

In the last few decades, it has been continuously stressed that the significance that mental disorders have for patients and society should be acknowledged. This is due to both the elevated frequency of such disorders and the social and economic burden they represent.1,2 Generalised acceptance of the fact that there are elevated pre-adult rates of these pathologies has been especially slow. Children and adolescents represent approximately 1/3 of the global population, and 20% of them are considered to require psychiatric care.3 Consequently, these pathologies are becoming more and more important among public health priorities.4,5 Evidence shows that a very significant portion of adult psychiatric disorders have their start in infancy or adolescence.6 In this issue, Catalá-López et al.7 showed that disability-adjusted life years lost, in adolescents and youth, are in large part related to psychiatric disorders such as depression, alcohol abuse, drug addiction, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Early care for the different disorders in the first stages of life can prevent negative consequences derived from the disorder, as in the case of children with autism8 or those at risk of conduct disorder.9 Some of these preventative programmes, which can be costly at first, have demonstrated that they