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Objective: The authors studied the factors affecting the recruitment into child and adolescent psychiatry training in the United States. Methods: Medical students (n = 154) and general and child and adolescent psychiatry residents (n = 111) completed a questionnaire to evaluate career choice in child psychiatry (n = 265). Results: Compared with medical students, general and child and adolescent psychiatry residents were more likely socially related; extroverted; empathic; warm; tolerant of ambiguity; interested in quality of life, social systems, and a developmental perspective; and to espouse greater satisfaction working with psychiatric patients, but less interested in sports or outdoor activities. Seventy-eight percent of medical students considered psychiatry as a potential career, and 28% indicated a strong interest in psychiatry. Sixty-four percent of general psychiatry residents considered child psychiatry as a career. Reasons precluding child psychiatry were preference for working with adults (33%), the clinical child rotation (19%), years of training (13%), and indebtedness (3%). Conclusions: More effort is needed to address the barriers to selecting child psychiatry as a career among medical students and general psychiatry residents.

Objective: Prospective study of well children at risk of bipolarity to identify the frequency and pattern of potentially prodromal symptoms/behaviors for bipolar disorder type I (BPI) disorder. Method: A total of 110 at-risk children with a BPI parent and 112 children with well parents were studied. Ten-year data collection used structured and semistructured annual interviews covering developmental, medical, and behavioral features. Randomized histories for 222 children were submitted blindly for risk rating of bipolarity by a panel of clinicians. Results: Children in the bipolar sample had an overall risk rating of 41% as compared with 16% for control children. Features noted more frequently among the at-risk group were anxious/worried, attention poor/distractible in school, easily excited, hyperalert, mood changes/labile, role impairment in school, somatic complaints, and stubborn/determined. Five additional manic-like behaviors became more evident among at-risk adolescents at the 10-year follow-up: high energy, decreased sleep, problems with thinking/concentration, and excessive and loud talking. Conclusions: The children of a parent with BPI manifested, episodically, miniclusters of potentially prodromal characteristics more frequently than the children of normal controls. None of these children met any of the sets of diagnostic criteria for prepubertal bipolar disorder.

The white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) is a globally distributed top predator. Due to its ecological importance, increasing knowledge through continued research can enhance management measures. One such facet of biological knowledge is the identification of shark nursery areas, as protection of these regions is critical to species survival. Presently, there are two known C. carcharias nursery areas in association with the Eastern Australian subpopulation; however, a nursery area associated with the Southern-Western Australian C. carcharias subpopulation has yet to be identified. Herein, we report opportunistic laser photogrammetry, stereo-photogrammetry, and baited remote underwater video systems (BRUVS) data that resulted in the identification of sixteen young-of-the-year (YOY)-juvenile C. carcharias from two separate regions (i.e., Salisbury Island and Daw Island) in South-West Australia. Additionally, anecdotal bycatch data associated with two YOY C. carcharias (i.e., 1.40 and 1.70 m total length) from another location within the Great Australian Bight are reported. While it is premature to conclude that these sites represent discrete or an expansive interconnected nursery area, the sightings success in this study is indicative that future research may want to consider implementing a study during a similar time period (i.e., February–March) while using a similar attractant methodology (i.e., bottom-set BRUVS baited with squid [Sepioteuthis australis]) to help elucidate the unique life-history characteristics of this C. carcharias subpopulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seventeen aggressive adolescents were assigned to a massage therapy group or a relaxation therapy group to receive 20-minute therapy sessions, twice a week for five weeks. The massaged adolescents had lower anxiety after the first and last sessions. By the end of the study, they also reported feeling less hostile and they were perceived by their parents as less aggressive. (Contains 36 references and 3 tables.) (GCP)

A comparison of 159 sexually abused African American (AA) and 77 Hispanic (HN) girls and caretakers found HN girls had more sexually abusive episodes and waited longer to disclose abuse. AA girls were more likely to have experienced vaginal penetration. Caretakers of HN girls perceived their children as more aggressive. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

This paper will focus on chance happenings and man's struggles to make sense of those random events that occur in everyday life. There is a readiness to deny chance happenings as powerful mediators in our life course and to transfer the guidance of the world to divine providence, to anthropomorphize fate, to search for blame, and to create conspiratorial theories out of natural disasters. Emphasis will be placed on understanding chance happenings from an exploration of coincidences, experiences perceived beyond coincidences, scientific predictors of causality, and developmental perspectives, as well as the individual's psychological strategies for coping with a fateful event, an acute traumatic moment in which there is sudden awareness of a perceived threat of injury and to life itself. The role of chance and environmental happenings in psychotherapy will be discussed with clinical vignettes.

This article features the response to the important commentary by Dr. Carlson. The Amish Study represents, as she notes, a special research population for investigation of "classic" bipolar disorder viewed against a homogeneous cultural landscape where emerging biological and behavioral prodromal features can be identified. Dr. Carlson questions "where are the bipolar offspring?" and suggests that this "should have been the thrust of this publication." The authors submit that their emphasis should not have focused on illness onset and morbid risk. This would have diverted them from their goal to report prospective data on characteristics and/or possible prodromal patterns before onset. In this article, the authors address Dr. Carlson's title question and clarify other equally important issues in the commentary.

The phenomenology of mystical experiences has been described throughout all the ages and in all religions. All mystical traditions identify some sense of union with the absolute as the ultimate spiritual goal. I assume that the pathway to both theistic and secular spirituality and our readiness to seek a solution in a psychological merger with something beyond the self evolves out of our human experience. Spirituality is one of man's strategies for dealing with the limitations of the life cycle, separation and loss, biological fragility, transience, and non-existence. Spirituality may serve as the affective component to a belief system or myth that is not rooted in scientific evidence but is lived as if it is true. Spirituality may take many forms, but I will suggest that in some instances it may serve as a reparative process in which one creates in the external world, through symbolic form, a nuance or facet of an internalized mental representation which has become lost or is no longer available to the self; or it may represent the continuity of the self-representation after death through a self-object merger. Lastly I will illustrate from the writings of two of our greatest poets, Dante Alighieri and William Wordsworth, how their poetry became interwoven with a profound spirituality. In Dante we will see the elaboration of a religious spirituality, while in the writings of Wordsworth a secular spirituality emerges interwoven with nature and belatedly his identification with 'tragic man' as his mythos.