Child and adolescent psychiatry in Lithuania

Abstract

Child and adolescent psychiatry (CAP) in Lithuania has been developing before the end of the 1980 under the strong influence of the Soviet school of child psychiatry. There have been several sites for spreading the knowledge within the field of CAP in the former Soviet Union, with some differences in interpretation of classification systems and treatment modalities (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev). However, in general, Soviet child psychiatry was mainly influenced by child neurology and general psychiatry. The biological model of interpretation and management of most disorders in childhood and adolescence was prevailing in the Soviet child psychiatry. There was an ideological taboo to claim that social problems cannot be considered as one of the causes for mental, emotional or behavioral disorders, as they were supposed to have been solved by the political system. This intervention of communist ideology into the field led to the overemphasis of organic and endogenous factors both in diagnostic interpretations and management of all possible disorders in the field of mental health.