Schizophrenia in Children and Adolescents

From our regular book review column.

Schizophrenia, as we have come to conceptualize it, is a complicated syndrome, with multiple genetic and some environmental factors contributing to it. With the end of the era in which parental disturbances in communication were considered the primary etiology, we have moved on to a biological concept, heavily emphasizing genetic and neurodevelopmental factors in the etiology and psychopharmacology in the treatment of schizophrenia. When schizophrenia-like symptoms emerge in small children and young adolescents, one would expect the biological factors to be much more prominent.