Child Psychiatry
The Department of Child Psychiatry at the University of Turku is closely linked with the Clinic of Child Psychiatry at Turku University Hospital, which is one of the oldest clinical child psychiatry facilities in Finland.
The Department is responsible for the child psychiatry basic training for medical students, and for the scientific and professional training. The scientific research is very active – almost 40 % of all child psychiatry dissertations in five Finnish universities has been produced at the University of Turku.
According to the current understanding it is not possible to prove any single background factor to child psychiatry disorders. The background of child psychiatry disorders lies on the interaction between biologic-genetic and psycho-social adverse factors, and on the cumulation and joint effects of these factors.
The goal of child psychiatric evaluation and treatment is to find out the key turning points of this interaction chain. These key turning points can be biological, psychological or social. The idea of the child psychiatry treatment is to reverse the negative ‘circulus vitiosus’ of adverse farctors into positive direction.
The child psychiatry treatment is usually a combination of various treatment methods, like
- interventions onto psychosocial network (extrafamilial level)
- family centred therapy methods (intrafamilial level)
- individual oriented psychotherapy (individual level)
- medication (biological level)
