[Critical evaluation of the use of antidepressives in childhood]

In the introduction the authors study some technical, methodological, ethical, administrative and marketing problems about the evaluation and investigation in child and adolescence psychopharmacology. They make a revision and critical evaluation about. As a whole the clinic use of antidepressive drugs in childhood psychiatry. Then, some open and controlled trial about tricyclic antidepressives are evaluated. After this, the authors present the most important advances about the open and controlled clinic trials with several antidepressives: tricyclic, tetracyclic, ISSR and MAO-Inhibitors and other drugs (placebo response, psychotherapy, imipramine, nortryptiline, amitriptyline, fluoxetine, MAO-Inhibitors, lithium, mianserin, maprotyline, etc.). Beside, placebo effect, response prediction factors, biologic markers, diagnostic criteria, evaluation methods and technics, drugs associations, clinic types of child depression, etc, are studied. In the last, the authors present some clinical conclusions about this subject.