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recoveries which is not unusual in dealing with children referred for psychological difficulties,
other families had moved out of the Borough and some children had improved in the meantime through
the special educational or other measures which had been instituted in the interim period by clinic
staff.
The traditional field of competence of the Child Guidance Clinic and of its psychiatrist, in particular,
is the diagnosis and the treatment of emotional disturbance in children and adolescents. Soon
after Child Guidance Clinics were established in this country some 40 years ago it became obvious
to everybody concerned that one had to help the whole family in order to treat the child and that
nearly every unsettled child reflected a disturbed family situation.
But it took a further 20 years to recognise that child psychiatry meant family psychiatry and more
recently still through insight gained by sociological studies we have learned that children in their
narrow and extended family settings are also being influenced by forces prevalent in the wider
environment and that therefore child psychiatry forms an integral part, if not actually the driving
force, in any form of community psychiatry. Apart from a relatively few cases, such as children
suffering from inherent personality limitations, or exclusively maladjusted through the school
situation, or where the problem has arisen as the result of a temporary emotional crisis, as is not
infrequent in adolescence, the parents have to be involved in case work with a psychiatric social
worker while the child receives treatment. In fact, many of our failures are due to the parents'
lack of co-operation or inability to get involved. Delinquent children have been of very special
interest to child guidance teams ever since Healey and Bronner. as far back as 1915 at the
Psychopathic Clinic in Boston. U.S.A.. where they had introduced the now still practised tripartite
team approach of psychiatrist, educational psychologist and psychiatric social worker, first
investigated young people who appeared before the Courts. However, our chances of treating and
helping them are limited as it is not sufficient to unravel the underlying psychopathology or criminal
behaviour but one requires in treatment also the co-operation of the client and there are many socially
determined factors beyond the competence of psychiatry which promote delinquent tendencies.
Hence the statements one occasionally hears that a hardened and mature criminal might have been
salvaged if he had only had psychiatric attention as a child is not always true. Quite apart from
delinquency, contemporary youth manifests other disturbing expressions of behaviour which appear
to be rooted in social maladjustment and for which the help of the child psychiatrist is being sought,
but where his chances of achieving a cure are very limited.
/ am referring to young people involved in the socially paralysing effects of the contemporary drug
scene, the often very disturbing precocious sexual behaviour of others and to those anti-authoritarian
militant youths who carry their neurotically determined need for forceful self-expression to extremes
of violence which are not acceptable to the community. Such admittedly rarely referred expressions
of youthful emotionality may in the individual case require psychological help but when they are the
result of misguided submission of young people to social pressures beyond the influence of the
child guidance clinics they can only be dealt with on a national or even international scale by those
who rule human fortunes by maintaining law and order, as they are expressions of the so-called
permissive society, which in spite of its many social blessings for the mature person, appears
occasionally too threatening for young people of weaker moral constitution, who then succumb to
the inconsistencies, hypocrisies and materialistic influences that impinge upon them."
Tuberculosis
Prevention of tuberculosis by B.C.G. vaccination
B.C.G. vaccination is offered to all school children over 13 years of age.
No students of Further Education took advantage of the opportunity to have B.C.G. vaccination
during 1969.
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