ADHD en hersenen:First do no harm!

Begin dit jaar verscheen er in het internationale vaktijdschrift Lancet Psychiatry1 een merkwaardig artikel over ADHD en hersenomvang, want de conclusies van de 82 auteurs staan haaks op hun resultaten en bevindingen. Waarom overdrijven of verdraaien sommige wetenschappers hun bevindingen, en met welke gevolgen

Teachers with Special Needs. De-Psychiatrization of Children in Schools

Psychiatrization not only affects adults. Ever more children in Western countries are being diagnosed with a mental disorder of behavior, such as ADHD. Children may often be labelled with the best intentions, for example in order to be able to provide them with suitable care and guidance. However, this labelling can have exclusionary effects and often entails the consequence that important discussion about contextual factors that give rise to (the perception of) unwelcome behavior or academic underperformance rarely, if at all, takes place. In this article we contend that although children are of central concern to schools and the design of pupils’ education, it is important not to make pupils the sole owner of problems that arise. It is therefore high time that a far more critical normative stance towards inclusive education is taken, in which the presently widespread biomedical approach is met with a school community response that focuses not on the nature of individual disorders but on the special need for additional capacity that schools and teachers have in meeting (perceived) deviant behaviors and emotions and/or academic underperformance. We argue that teaching should not set out to remedy individual diagnoses, but that teachers should be supported to extend their professional competence to the benefit of all pupils

From children to teachers with special needs

Inclusief onderwijs betekent dat alle kinderen op een reguliere school in hun eigen buurt onderwijs volgen. In Nederland zijn verschillende pogingen gedaan om dit in de praktijk te brengen: het Weer Samen Naar School beleid, de Leerlinggebonden Financiering (de rugzakjes) en, meest recentelijk, de wet op Passend Onderwijs. Al deze uitwerkingen zijn echter gericht op het individuele model van inclusief onderwijs, met als afwijkend ervaren kenmerken of eigenschappen van kinderen als uitgangspunt. Hiermee is eerder meer exclusie dan inclusie bewerkstelligd. Dit artikel pleit voor het sociale model van inclusie. Scholen zijn dan ingericht op omgaan met diversiteit en bieden een context waarin geen individuele barrières bestaan voor deelname aan onderwijs. Een eerste wezenlijke stap om de focus van individueel naar het sociaal vormgeven van inclusief onderwijs te verleggen, is om voortaan te spreken van leerkrachten in plaats van kinderen met speciale onderwijsbehoeften.Inclusive education means that all pupils attend school in their locality. In The Netherlands various subsequent national education policies aimed towards this goal. These policies have however pursued an individual model of inclusive education, in which personal attributes taken to be special were the point of departure. The outcome has sooner been more exclusion than more inclusion. In this article we advocate that by re-designing education around handling diversity and so creating settings in which individual barriers to participation are absent, a social model of inclusion is better able to achieve true inclusion. A first significant step in moving away from individual towards the social shaping of inclusive education is to henceforth speak of teachers’ special professional needs instead of pupils with special needs.</p

ADHD and Brain Anatomy: What Do Academic Textbooks Used in the Netherlands Tell Students?

Studies of brain size of children classified with ADHD appear to reveal smaller brains when compared to ‘normal’ children. Yet, what does this mean? Even with the use of rigorously screened case and control groups, these studies show only small, average group differences between children with and without an ADHD classification. However, academic textbooks used in the Netherlands often portray individual children with an ADHD classification as having a different, malfunctioning brain that necessitates medical intervention. This conceptualisation of ADHD might serve professional interests, but not necessarily the interests of children

Sick or Sad? A Qualitative Study on How Dutch GPs Deal With Sadness Complaints Among Young Adults

Feelings of sadness among young adults related to a certain phase of life or to societal factors run the risk of being interpreted as an individual medical problem. Therefore, healthcare professionals should more often widen their perspective and consider de-medicalization as being part of their professional responsibility too. This article presents results from a qualitative interview conducted with 13 GPs in different phases of their career to get more insight into the way they deal with complaints of sadness among young adults. All participants acted proactively but in different ways. Based on the interviews, a typology of three types of general practitioners has been created: the fast referrer, the expert, and the societal GP. There seems to be a paradox in the way GPs think about de-medicalization on a macro level and the way they act on a micro level. Elaborating on Parsons’(1951) classical concept of the sick role, this study introduces the term semi-legitimized sick role to clarify this paradox. The third type, “the societal GP”, appears to be the most able to show a more multifactorial view on complaints of sadness. Therefore, this type connects the most to a course of de-medicalization