American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry


The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is a 501 non-profit professional association in the United States dedicated to facilitating psychiatric care for children and adolescents. The Academy is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Various levels of membership are available to physicians specialized in child psychiatry or pediatrics, as well as medical students interested in the field, in the United States and abroad.
Established in 1953 as the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, it became the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 1989.
Dr. William Ayres,a highly respected psychiatrist, served as president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from 1993 to 1995. Prosecutors’ first effort to convict Ayres of sexually molesting his underage psychiatric patients ended in mistrial after jurors deadlocked in 2009 due to claims of dementia making him mentally incompetent to stand trial. In 2012, a forensic psychiatrist at Napa State Hospital, after gathering evidence from Ayres’ daily interactions with staff, charged he had been using his knowledge of psychiatry to fake his symptoms of dementia. In 2013 he was convicted of eight felony counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child and sentenced to 8 years in prison.

Publications

Since 1962, the AACAP has published its monthly journal, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. There have been concerns about industry-sponsored clinical trials published in the journal. JAACAP editors have repeatedly declined to retract the journal's 2001 article on study 329, a clinical trial examining paroxetine and teenagers. The trial was sponsored by, and ghostwritten on behalf of, SmithKline Beecham, and is widely regarded as having downplayed the trial's negative results.