Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik.
- Date:
- [1974]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik. Source: Wellcome Collection.
58/584 page 30
![30 Theory for a New Field Conclusion All data from our study and practice lead us to conclude that at the present state of our knowledge we are better able to define situations of risk for the child than to identify the elements of vulnerability or invulnerability. At best, we recognize them after the fact, having observed a paradoxical resistance to stress or a disconcerting fragility within an overtly satisfactory context. When one studies a sample from the general population, one comes up with numerous individuals who have experienced the same stresses as patients and have emerged relatively unscathed. This leads us to conclude that the critical factor determining vulnerability or resilience to risk is not the risk itself but rather the relationship between the risk and the person in terms of his psychobiological makeup, his past history, his individual characteristics, and so forth. What follow-up studies have shown is that only a relatively few children whose childhood disturbances have necessitated psychiatric care and major therapeutic measures (e.g., special boarding schools) become mentally ill as adults. A majority find a niche in life at a socioprofessional level that is inferior to what their intellectual ability and sociocultural background would lead one to expect—mental impoverishment in place of mental illness [4, 13]. What we now know, contrary to what was long thought, is that the childhood of mentally ill adults has not been silent, or psychologically uneventful. The pathological manifestations were simply not recognized, or were hidden or distorted in the recollections of the parents. When a less biased report is available, say from a former schoolmate, a history of peculiar episodic behavior or personality traits usually can be obtained. Excluding the patent psychoses of childhood, for which the prognosis remains ominous, the most disruptive disorders are not always the most dangerous for the future. Certain mildly neurotic symptoms, such as phobias, are being regarded as almost part of normal development, and in these times it would be almost impossible to find a child who has grown up asymptomatically. Among the 66 children in our longitudinal sample only one could be said to even approximate to this ideal and she was by no means the most interesting psychologically [7]. Much remains to be learned before we discover what, on different](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18021876_0059.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
