Introduction: Behavioral neuroscience and childhood mental illness

Advances in the treatment of mental illness depend, in part, on the elimination of barriers to the use of new basic research findings. Some of the barriers originate in the different research perspectives adopted by clinical and basic researchers. Clinical research is driven by the need to recruit and examine classes of individuals, and so the conceptual framework focuses largely on categories of disorders. Basic researchers, including psychologists and behavioral neuroscientists, investigate fundamental features of behavior such as emotion regulation, attention, or arousal; therefore, disorders are commonly approached from a "dimensional" framework. In the broadest sense dimensions are those features that are common to multiple disorders. Categories are an effort to draw distinctions among disorders. The differences between these frameworks, and the perspectives held among clinicians and basic scientists, are not dichotomous. Many clinicians investigate fundamental aspects of pathophysiology and behavior that apply to multiple disorders, and many basic researchers are developing animal "models" of categorical disorders. It is timely and important to examine these approaches critically, and to work toward formulating perspectives that capture the strengths of each group of researchers so that their common goal of translating research findings into treatments for childhood mental health disorders is strengthened.