Welcome to the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Message from the Director

I’m glad that you are curious or interested in child and adolescent psychiatry. It is an exciting and rapidly growing field addressing both society’s needs and scientific advances.  More than 20% of American children suffer from mental disorders but only 20 to 40% of them receive professional attention for evaluation and treatment.  Even among those receiving professional attention, only a fraction of them have access to child and adolescent psychiatrist’s’ expertise due to limited availability/number of child and adolescent psychiatrists. The Child & Adolescent Psychiatry division provides the important functions of education, clinical services and research within the medical school and in the larger community of New Jersey.

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Education

The missions of the division are:   1) To educate the future generation of physicians through medical student education and insure an understanding of children’s mental illnesses no matter what specialty training they undertake after medical school.   2) To train adult psychiatry residents in caring for youth.  3) To train specialists in child and adolescent psychiatry for expert care of young patients  and consultation to other professionals, pediatricians, psychologists, social workers, nurses, teachers, etc.

Clinical Services

The Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic provides psychiatric evaluations, treatments and the pharmacologic management of childhood mental disorders. It accepts referrals from other physicians and mental health professionals for the consultation and/or joint management of cases. Fellows and residents in training provide care under the direct supervision of the attending physician/faculty member. The faculty and trainees also provide clinical services in various settings, inpatient, outpatient, partial hospitalization, and pediatric consultation/liaison services at University Behavioral Health Care (Rutgers), Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, Somerset Medical Center, University Correctional Health Care- Juvenile Justice Commission (UBHC/Rutgers), Children’s Specialized Hospital and others. The services emphasize multimodal and multidisciplinary evaluation and treatment, and collaboration with the family, school and community.

Research

The division participates in a variety of research programs including learning disorders, autism, asthma, etc.  We also strive to participate/collaborate with researchers of Rutgers University, such as Department of Genetics, Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research, etc.