This volume is based on the proceedings of a conference on Child Research in Psychopharmacology held in 1958 under the auspices of the Psychopharmacology Service Center of the National Institute of Mental Health. It consists of a series of papers and discussions which were intended primarily to raise questions about philosophical, methodological, and practical problems in the evaluation of drug therapy with children. The participants were some two dozen persons representing psychiatry, pediatrics, psychology, pharmacology, and social work.
As is true of the majority of books which report verbatim proceedings of symposia, where each individual prepares his material independently and for each paper only, the speaker and the discussant know what is planned, there is a good deal of uneveness in the presentations. Opinions range from the necessity of elaborating hypotheses capable of being tested and designing studies which can answer the questions being asked down to the impossibility of