Child & Adolescent Neuropsychiatry

Caring Pediatric and Adolescent Neuropsychiatry in Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Charlotte, NC

A professional pitfall of psychology and psychiatry is to treat children like "little adults." Because their brains are undergoing continuous and rapid development, it takes a specialist to create accurate models of mental issues. Of course, it also takes compassion and patience to remain sensitive to the needs of our youngest patients. At NC Neuropsychiatry Attention & Memory Centers, we regularly receive referrals to help children work through behavioral and developmental disorders without resorting to a harsh regimen of psychoactive drugs that may cause more harm than good.

Child Neuropsychiatry

When the neuropsychiatry clinic was founded in 1978, it was a pediatric clinic. Dr. Gualtieri, the founder of the clinics, is a board-certified specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry. The original focus of the clinic had to do with ADHD in children, autism and developmental disabilities, pediatric seizure disorders and unusual conditions like Tourette's syndrome, Cornelia deLange syndrome, Williams syndrome, etc. Although the clinic was always primarily a neuropsychiatry clinic, there have always been referrals of children with anxiety or mood disorders, or even psychotic disorders.

As the years passed, and we got older, so did our patients. Today, child and adolescent patients comprise about half of all referrals to the neuropsychiatry clinics. We also see adults, and even elderly patients.

We have done clinical trials of many of the medications that are used to treat children and adolescents. We've done research having to do with drug side effects in children and adolescents, to further our treatment knowledge and options. We are, however, concerned with the overuse, and inappropriate use, of psychiatric medications in children. Children and adolescents are not just "small adults" when it comes to the manifestation of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional disorders, or when it comes to their response to medications that affect the brain. So, we are equally concerned with the inappropriate application of adult psychiatric categories to children, for example, the widely misused "bipolar disorder". One has to be quite conservative with the diagnosis of childhood disorders, and the problems that occur in children are not necessarily continuous with, or predictive of, disorders in adult life.

Call North Carolina's most trusted child and adolescent psychiatrists at (919) 537-2561.