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Nearly one year ago, Alan Kazdin, Ph.D., was selected to take on
the director's role at Yale's prestigious Child Study Center (CSS)
in New Haven, Conn. Kazdin, who had been at Yale since 1989, formerly
headed an outpatient clinic for research at the center and had a
secondary appointment on its faculty.
Kazdin reflects on his first year in the job and looks forward
to the future as he speaks with New England Psychologist's
Catherine Robertson Souter.
Q: I understand that you were the first psychologist ever named
to this position. Were all the past directors psychiatrists?
A: Well, the Child Study Center houses the department of child
psychiatry, the only free-standing department of child psychiatry
in the country, but it has had other leaders who have not been child
psychiatrists.
Q: But there were some complaints about a psychologist taking
the job. Did those people have the same issues with the other directors
who were not child psychologists?
A: There were concerns at the outset. That is exactly right.
But, the Child Study Center began in 1911; there have only been
a handful of leaders in that time. It' s not like a particular group
has seen one or two or three different directors.
Q: How has the first year gone?
A: It has been enormously stimulating and invigorating. The
challenge is to take a really great place and figure out what it
would take to continue to be cutting edge for the next decade. The
mandate at a place like Yale or Harvard is to take greatness and
to keep striving. There is strong support for that at all levels
- so it's been invigorating.
Q: What in your past, especially in your training as a psychologist,
has helped you in this position?
A: You know, I don't see it that way. My colleagues and I are
concerned with the problems of childhood mental health and development
and families. The answer to these problems or questions really has
no discipline. To solve the problems that I am interested in requires
child psychology, psychiatry and genetics, endocrinology, pediatrics…The
task isn't one related to discipline. The discipline is relevant
but any discipline is really incomplete.
What has prepared me is my research for many years on the topics,
my keen interest in this (area) and my interest in bringing to bear
expertise from diverse areas to address critical child problems.
Psychology doesn't own any of these problems, nor does child psychiatry,
and it would be a mistake to think of these issues as discipline-related.
Q: Have you implemented many changes in your first year?
A: We do have strategic planning that's going to take place
in six areas. The first three areas are underway.
First, we have a group looking at our science - where we should
be in the next five or 10 years, where should the field be and how
can we help get the field there?
We have another group that has finished the planning of our clinical
services. What would make our clinical services clearly superior
to what they are now?
And then training - what can we do to make our training better?
We have training in child psychiatry and social work and psychology.
The greatest problem that we face is that there are too few child
psychiatrists being trained in the United States to serve the needs
of children. So, we have a strategic planning group [working] on
ways to recruit more people into child psychiatry.
This coming year will be devoted to three other areas including
our community work, our international activities and policy and
how we should move in the next five years to enhance those.
Q: When you say policy - is that the policy of the Child Study
Center or governmental policy?
A: We do work in policy throughout the United States. We work
in education, in policing, in violence control. We have a huge group
of people who are very concerned with national policy that would
promote child development. For example, one of our investigators
is looking at education policy and its impact in 40 different states.
When people want to know about something, we often have a set of
investigators who are working on it so we can help children on a
large scale as well as individually with our clinical services.
We have child psychiatry, genetics, epidemiology, education, pediatrics,
molecular biology, special education, child psychology, social workers
and nursing - all within our department.
We have a number of disciplines that are brought to bear.
Q: Where do you see the CSS in 10 years?
A: We are probably number one in the world in autism and pervasive
developmental disorders and in the area of Tourette's Syndrome and
we are strong in many other areas. What we are planning is to identify
another area or two to achieve that level of visibility and expertise.
Our clinical services are also changing. We do the usual inpatient
and outpatient but we are expanding to do more out in the homes
and community, to make it so that we can bring the treatment to
the people when the people can't come to the treatment.
Q: How do you disseminate the information you gather?
A: Perhaps the greatest thing we do in that area is our huge
training programs. We train medical students, undergraduate and
grad students. We train child psychiatry residents and psychology
interns and social work interns. And then we also have post-doctoral
fellows, a large number of them who want research careers in this
area. We train them for a year or two and then they leave and they
start their own labs.
All of us here are on limited time. The best thing that we can
do is to extend our enthusiasm for what we do and teach the research
methods and the techniques to send more clinicians and scientists
into the world.
Q: Anything people should know about the CSS that they might
not know?
A: The one thing to emphasize is that it is a one of a kind place.
In all medical schools, child psychiatry, if present at all, is
a division within adult psychiatry. A separate department that is
rather large and has many disciplines really provides the opportunity
to study things that are hard to do anywhere else.
Something that's sort of odd for an academic department is that
we have a huge international network. We collaborate with more than
30 countries to engage in clinical services. People come here to
be trained and we go to other countries to train. The commitment
not only has no disciplinary boundaries but no geographical boundaries.
We are interested in having impact on the world and so that requires
us to go to many other countries to train people and set up clinics.
As you are gathering, it's a rather unique setting.
The goal is really to understand and help child mental health.
When stated in a rather nebulous fashion, it opens one to disciplines,
to different countries, to different domains and we can get a lot
done that way, a lot done.
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