Over the last 20 years, child and adolescent psychiatry has managed to establish itself as a flourishing branch of medicine. Several major textbooks appeared (e.g. Rutter & Hersov, 1977; Rutter & Hersov, 1985; Noshpitz et al., 1987; Lewis, 1991; Rutler, Taylor & Hersov, 1994) and thousands of empirically based studies were published. The clinical and research areas covered by child and adolescent psychiatry are enormous ranging from infant psychiatry to adolescent problems and from family relationship problems and sexual abuse to autism and anorexia nervosa.

The need for subspecialization gradually emerged, and volumes relating specifically to ‘developmental psychiatry’ (Rutter, 1980) and ‘developmental neuropsychiatry’ (Rutter, 1984) were published. These were fine pioneering works which contributed to the gradual, albeit usually implicit, delineation of ‘child neuropsychiatry’. However, most of the work published to date has been in the format of individual scientific papers or classical research reviews. Clinical aspects have been summarily dealt with, if at all.

A textbook specifically on ‘clinical child neuropsychiatry’ has been needed for some time. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first such book to be published. It aims to cover those infancy, childhood or adolescent onset disorders in which mental, emotional and behavioural problems predominate at one or other stage of development and for which biological factors have been shown to play a major pathogenetic/contributory role.