Comparison of Inpatients in Child Psychiatry in Rostock Between 1960 and 2015

Since its beginnings, child psychiatry has been subject to permanent change due to social changes and thus different expectations of the field, developments in diagnostics, therapy and the respective classification systems. After 1949 Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) underwent an independent and somatically oriented development. Although assumed that there was systematic injustice in inpatient facilities of child psychiatry in the GDR, no study from this period has been published to our knowledge up to now. The work presented here begins to close this gap by comparing data from 1960 with current data (2015) of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department at the Rostock Medical Center. Significant differences between results from 1960 and 2015 indicate a currently higher number of admissions, only half the length of stay, an alignment in the gender ratio, a trend towards adolescent patients, a shift away from the 1960 dominant intelligence impairment towards behavioural and emotional disorders, a higher proportion of children and adolescents treated with drugs, and more specialist follow-up treatments after the inpatient stay in 2015. We found no evidence of forced medication in 1960. The discussion also addresses the danger of a solitary development of child psychiatry away from a medical to a more social psychiatric, educational and therapeutic subject