ABSTRACT
Over this past century, services to children with mental health/behavioral health disorders evolved from both the child welfare system and the juvenile court system into a separate and major part of the network of public-sector services designed to address the problems of children. 1 This separate diagnostic and treatment system emerged during the first part of the century, and the specialty professions of child psychiatry, child psychology, and child-oriented social work grew in numbers. Despite this growth, when the White House Conference on Mental Health met in 1961 it included no discussions of children with mental health disorders, and the child mental health professionals raised concerns about this omission. To remedy this oversight, Congress commissioned the Joint Commission on Mental Health of Children in 1966–1968. This commission took the form of a panel of experts who held nationwide public forums and visited settings where professional treatment was offered. The result of this 2-year study was a series of recommendations that were published in a report entitled Crisis in Child Mental Health: Challenge for the 1970s (Joint Commission on Mental Health of Children, 1969).
