Diagnostic evaluation of the violent child and adolescent

The diagnostic evaluation of the violent child and adolescent is a collaborative exercise, requiring diverse expertise. Ironically, after systematic, comprehensive psychiatric, neurologic, psychologic, neuropsychologic, psychoeducational, family, and social evaluations have been completed, the clinician probably will not be able to make a hard and fast DSM-IV diagnosis; that is, unless the clinician is satisfied with fitting the behavioral pieces into the Conduct Disorder category and ignoring the rest of the clinical data. From time to time the clinician will be able to diagnose a bipolar mood disorder underlying a violent youngster's behavior. Occasionally the clinician will recognize paranoid schizophrenia motivating a particularly heinous or bizarre violent act. Most often the clinician will be faced with a variety of different kinds of psychiatric, neurologic, cognitive, and environmental vulnerabilities that have come together and created a violent child or adolescent. That's fine because almost invariably each discovered vulnerability has implications for treatment. The clinician evaluating a violent child or adolescent must overcome his or her initial disgust or anger at the youngster's behaviors and resist the impulse to dismiss the child as conduct disordered, as an incipient psychopath. That diagnosis leads nowhere. The identification of vulnerabilities leads to specific interventions and ultimately to the prevention of future violence.