[The role of psychiatrists in cooperative activity with school staff in school mental health].

Although it was started some ten years ago in Japan that psychiatrists should be involved as specialists in mental health activity in schools, what was expected at most was to give some therapeutic suggestions on inquiry by teachers in relation to desirable solutions to reduce problem behaviors as pathological symptoms. However, it is now beginning to be acknowledged by psychiatrists that they should not only help to reduce the already appearing severe symptoms, but also to maintain and even promote the mental health conditions of all school children and adolescents irrespective of whether symptoms are already present or not. The most useful activity for school teachers to be engaged in regarding both therapeutic and preventive mental health activities with certain positive results is to learn from case consultation in schools that they belong to with the attendance of psychiatrists about single symptoms after identifying them by themselves, and to know whether the single symptom really exists alone or is a component of a certain disorder, and also the cause of the symptom or the disorder.

A study of executive functions in delinquents with developmental disabilities within a Japanese reformatory.

Many attempts have been made to address the relation between antisocial behavior and executive function deficits. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate executive functions in juvenile delinquents with developmental disabilities by using the Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS), and then cross referencing this to their performance on Wechsler IQ Test, Das Naglieri Cognitive Assessment System (DN-CAS), and Rey's Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT). The data was collected from 164 participants with Mental Retardation (MR), Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), and Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and a factor analysis was applied to results of the BADS.