Practitioner’s Guide to Psychoactive Drugs for Children and Adolescents

information. This book aims to do this for practitioners, professionals in health, welfare, and education, and interested laypersons, including parents. This is no easy task, since the levels of technical knowledge vary from that of the special education teacher seeking information about the drugs that many such pupils will be receiving, to that of the modern young child and adolescent psychiatrist whose grasp of the difficult fields of pharmacokinetics (how drugs are absorbed, distributed, and eliminated) and neurotransmitter physiology (via which most psychoactive drugs work) is daunting to the editors, who grew up in the bucolic clinical-empirical era. Inevitably there are sections of the book that will prove too technical for any except the medically qualified, but considerable effort has been applied to make much of the text, especially that discussing the clinical uses and side effects of the drugs, comprehensible to anyone used to getting information by reading. We also take comfort in the fact that many of the major contributions in pediatric psychophar- macology have been made by nonmedical professionals, notably psychologists, suggesting that an audience beyond the medically qualified is practicable. One other problem confronted us-whether to organize the book by psycho- pathological symptoms (e.g., hyperactivity) and disorders (e.g., autism) or by drugs.

information. This book aims to do this for practitioners, professionals in health, welfare, and education, and interested laypersons, including parents. This is no easy task, since the levels of technical knowledge vary from that of the special education teacher seeking information about the drugs that many such pupils will be receiving, to that of the modern young child and adolescent psychiatrist whose grasp of the difficult fields of pharmacokinetics (how drugs are absorbed, distributed, and eliminated) and neurotransmitter physiology (via which most psychoactive drugs work) is daunting to the editors, who grew up in the bucolic clinical-empirical era. Inevitably there are sections of the book that will prove too technical for any except the medically qualified, but considerable effort has been applied to make much of the text, especially that discussing the clinical uses and side effects of the drugs, comprehensible to anyone used to getting information by reading. We also take comfort in the fact that many of the major contributions in pediatric psychophar- macology have been made by nonmedical professionals, notably psychologists, suggesting that an audience beyond the medically qualified is practicable. One other problem confronted us-whether to organize the book by psycho- pathological symptoms (e.g., hyperactivity) and disorders (e.g., autism) or by drugs.