Evolution of a journal: outing some ghosts from the closet.

History is about controversy, not just facts. Take, for example, the history of this Journal. Some would maintain that in its early years, the JAACAP was filled with clinically useful case vignettes. But then, their story goes, it took a sharp turn to the left, and now is packed with arcane statistics. Others, conversely, recall those early years as the dark ages of child and adolescent psychiatry, when the Journal was filled with our equivalent of bleeding and purging. Until, they say, it took a sharp right turn and made a commitment to empiricism and the experimental research model. Which are the real facts? The only way to find out is to test those differing views by holding the past 40 years of our Academy Journal up to a mirror. Then we may be able to see the present in the past, and the past in the present. And perhaps get a better view of where we are now, and where we are going. There are several ways to examine the evolution of the Journal. There is the numerical way, from the 750 copies published quarterly in 1962, to today’s monthly subscription of more than 10,000. Or, we could study the Journal by examining its editorships. But the Journal isn’t about editors. It’s about what’s between the covers. And when you lay the covers of all those issues side by side, they tell a story. It’s a story that may surprise you. So I will try to put together that story, one that the Journal might tell if it could speak, decade by decade. Admittedly, using decades as dividing lines is quite arbitrary, but this review itself is arbitrary, more subjective and impressionistic than comprehensively inclusive. The only thing systematic about it is the fact that I have reviewed all the issues of the Journal from that very first one I remember reading as a child fellow in 1962. Let’s start at the beginning, with the Academy Journal in the 1960s. Volume 1, number 1, was published in January 1962. It was about the size of a small town telephone book, with a cover, not the familiar orange, but battleship gray. Keep in mind that the early 1960s was a time when there was only one textbook—Kanner’s Child Psychiatry (Kanner, 1962). It was a time when there was little interest in diagnosis beyond separating neurosis from psychosis. A time when the concept of trauma in childhood meant the birth of a new sibling or the move to a new neighborhood. A time when child abuse was still a dark family secret. The purpose of this new scholarly arm of the Academy was spelled out right from the start: to disseminate and integrate our ever-increasing knowledge about treatment and theoretical concepts of child development (Josselyn, 1962). As it turned out, though, it would not be a time for integrating what we knew. Instead, it would be a time for debating what we knew. And the Journal would be the forum for that debate. The theoretical model in the 1960s was psychoanalytic. Its research method was the clinical case study. Right off the bat, the debate began. Much of that first issue was devoted to reporting a symposium on research directions for infancy and early childhood Accepted January 13, 2004. Dr. McDermott is the former Editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Professor Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine. An edited version of the closing plenary lecture given at the Fiftieth Anniversary Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Miami, October 16, 2003. The author pays tribute to the three Editors who preceded him, Irene Josselyn, Evoleen Rexford, and Melvin Lewis, and our current Editor, Mina Dulcan. Correspondence to Dr. McDermott, 67-1003 N. Alulike Road, Kamuela, HI 96743; e-mail: dermott@verizon.net. 0890-8567/04/4306–0650©2004 by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. DOI: 10.1097/01.chi.0000122732.72597.95