PsyDactic - Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Board Study Edition

Let me know what you think! - This episode focuses on communication disorders in children, specifically language, speech sound, fluency, and social communication disorders. It differentiates these disorders through case vignettes, comparing and contrasting DSM-5 TR criteria, and highlighting key features of each disorder. Language Disorder is characterized by persistent difficultie

Let me know what you think! - This episode begins with a case vignette about a 7-year-old boy, Tommy, who exhibits global developmental delays and impaired adaptive functioning. Dr. O'Leary explores the DSM-5 criteria for ID, emphasizing deficits in intellectual functions and adaptive functioning during the developmental period. Severity levels are based on adaptive functioning and

Let me know what you think! - In the last episode, I introduced behaviorism, which took a strikingly different approach to human learning and development by basically assuming that everything we are on the inside is somehow learned from the environment, except for some of the most basic things we need for survival. Our inner life and the reasons we give for our decisions are more o

Let me know what you think! - I have so far discussed some of the early psychosexual, psychosocial and cognitive approaches to child development, but I would be remiss if I did not also mention a group of theorists who attempted to study humanity by completely ignoring the fact that they have thoughts and emotions. The behavioralists tried to simplify the study of humans by massive

Let me know what you think! - In episode 8, I started discussing temperament theory with an introduction to Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess. They first developed a temperamental formulation by following 141 children longitudinally and proposed 9 dimensions of temperament that can be reduced to three basic categories: Easy, Difficult, or Slow-to-warm-up temperament. There were man

Let me know what you think! - While it may seem quaint today, the radical contribution that Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess made to child development was to look at children as unique individuals with very different innate approaches to the world that were present at birth. While processes like attachment and their psychosocial context help to determine a child’s outcome, what

Let me know what you think! - Attachment theory began when John Bowlby rebelled from the psychoanalytic establishment by, for the first time, observing families interacting in order to understand individuals. Bowlby was later joined by Mary Ainsworth who developed on of the most iconic clinical tools in the history of child psychology: The Strange Situation. This episode begins wit

Let me know what you think! - Erik Erikson's psychosocial theory of development focuses on the social and emotional aspects of human growth. A child’s cognitive development underlies what Erikson describes and arguably, without the cognitive skills described by Piaget, the psychosocial stages that Erikson describes would not be possible. Erikson's stages emphasize an individual's

Let me know what you think! - Jean Piaget's description of cognitive development is markedly different from psychosexual and psychoanalytic approaches. He was concerned primarily with cognitive abilities. Instead of basically just making up a complex inner life and mode of relating to mommy’s breast, he described the kinds of cognitive tasks children are actually increasingly abl

Let me know what you think! - Following Freud, there were many researchers trying to make sense of child development using his psychosexual approach as a framework. Among those that adopted the psychoanalytic approach was his daughter, Anna Freud, who has been called “the mother of child psychoanalysis.” Other mothers include the developers of Object Relations including Melanie