ABSTRACT
Until recently, childhood schizophrenia was barely acknowledged as a legitimate topic of psychiatric interest. It tended to arouse defensiveness in child psychiatrists, and adult psychiatrists could be relied on to be vague about whether schizophrenia could have an onset before early adult life. The subject was (and still is) scarcely alluded to in either child or adult psychiatry textbooks, and the research literature was exceedingly small – not too long ago a leading journal in the field felt the need to change its name from the Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia to the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
