Infancy and Early Childhood Mental Health Assessment: Overview

As the first 5 years of life are a period of major developmental changes with quite a lot of individual variability in pace and course, a major challenge faced by clinicians is to decide what behaviors fall into the normal variability range and what are signs of early psychopathology. The cutoff point is not always easy to determine, especially when one considers cultural variations in defining normality and abnormality. It is still a major responsibility that we, IMH clinicians, have, to be able to determine whether and what type of intervention is needed for a young child and his/her caregivers.