ABSTRACT
When the associations between mental disorders in childhood and adulthood were reviewed a decade ago (Rutter, 1995), the main conclusion was that the findings raised key questions about possible causal mechanisms -the circumstances in the biology or in the environment that make continuities or discontinuities either more or less likely. Similar conclusions were drawn in reviews of the concept of developmental psychopathology (Cicchetti & Cohen, 1995; Rutter & Sroufe, 2000) and of a developmental perspective (Rutter, 2005).
