Mission and Objectives

The Child Study Center is a department the Yale University School of Medicine. The mission of the Center is to understand children's mental health problems, and prevent or alleviate the symptoms of patients who suffer from them. The mission requires understanding child development and its underpinnings and many contexts and influences in which development unfolds. Over the past several decades, the Center has taken advantage of its unique position to bring together a faculty with extraordinary breadth of research and clinical interests. The faculty includes internationally recognized experts from multiple disciplines, including child psychiatry, pediatrics, psychology, genetics, neurobiology, epidemiology, nursing, education, social work, and social policy. Child psychiatry serves as the primary discipline represented, and the Center plays a key national and international role in psychiatric research, training, and professional activity. The mission of the Center is carried out through six interrelated areas.

Research

We study development and child and family functioning in many ways. Our research spans from genes and brain neurotransmitters to community based education and treatment. We develop novel treatments, evaluate their effectiveness, and then provide these as part of our clinical services to translate advanced science into advanced patient care. The scientific research has led to critical discoveries for a range of neuropsychiatric disorders, and our research and researchers have been widely recognized as a result.

Clinical Services

We treat children and families in outpatient and inpatient clinical settings but also provide clinical interventions in the schools, in homes of families, and in the community. The challenge is not only to provide treatments but innovate, adapt, and develop services that can be extended to the many individuals who are underserved. To optimize the benefits to children and families, we work closely with physicians, teachers, police, and community leaders. We have long recognized the necessity of assessing development of the children in the contexts in which function. Our evaluation and intervention programs not only focus on the child, but also address the interactive influences of home, school, neighborhood, and culture in which the child is placed.

Training

We are deeply committed to training the next generation of leaders, researchers, and services providers. To that end, we have extremely competitive training programs in child psychiatry, psychology, and social work. We span a range of levels of training to foster careers in health-related fields, including seminars to undergraduates and three years of contact with medical students. We have strong postdoctoral training programs to provide opportunities for young investigators to work in the laboratory and clinical settings to learn the latest techniques in genetics, microbiology, neuroimaging, pharmacology, psychotherapy, and other areas of mental health research.

Community Services

We work in the schools at the level of individual classrooms but also in the design and evaluation of programs in the communities of over 40 states within the United States. Our school programs alone encompass over 500 school districts nationwide. Our community programs involve collaboration with school superintendents, principals, teachers, judges, attorneys, police officers, and legislators.

International Activities

Our mission to understand and help children and families has no geographical boundaries. Consequently, we work with organizations, research collaborators, and clinical services in over 30 other countries. The activities involve collaborative studies to understand and chart child psychiatric problems and child development worldwide, to develop programs that provide clinical services to children and families in countries in which resources may be lacking, and to train individuals who can assume leadership roles in their home countries. We convene conferences, visit other countries to conduct training, and invite scientists and clinicians from other countries to learn at the Center.

Social Policy

Our interdisciplinary faculty work directly on policy issues related to child care, education, teacher training and recruitment, and health care at the national level. Systems of care at the state and federal level, leaving aside the broader world arena, can directly impact child mental and physical health. We are involved in developing and evaluating policy in over 40 states within the United States, and serve as a resource to legislators who craft policy for children and health care more generally. Much of our work informs national policy in relation to services provided to children and families.

Overall, our mission is to understand and to help children and families. This requires careful integration of science and clinical services. Our faculty members are internationally recognized as leaders who have career commitments to accomplish our mission. The majority of investigators are also clinicians. The shared experience of taking on the complex real world problems that confront children, families and communities serves to unite scientists from disparate conceptual views and perspectives. The result is a uniquely collaborative research environment that has generated advances in the genetics and microbiology of psychiatric disorders, diagnosis, assessment, treatment, and prevention. Major advances continue to emerge at the Center from the study of autism and pervasive developmental disorders, Tourette’s syndrome, anxiety disorders, mood disorders, attention deficit disorders, conduct disorders and exposure to violence, among other areas. Separate programs and services are listed on this site and convey the ways in which our multiple missions are served and the caliber of the faculty and staff involved.