A System of Treatment and Rehabilitation of Hyperactive Children

Abstract

Many years of coping with hyperactive behavior in children have confronted researchers with ever new problems to solve. As early as the 1920s, Soviet child psychiatrists (M. O. Gurevich, 1927; V. P. Kashchenko, 1919; T. P. Simson, 1929; and M. I. Jogikhes, 1929) endeavored to show that hyperactivity was not just a medical or just a pedagogical problem, but a combination of both. In 1919 a psychoneurological sanatorium school was established for nearnormal children from the ages of 8 to 14 with minor aberrations in the sense of nervousness and general neurological imbalance (M.O. Gurevich, 1925). In many countries the 1950s were marked by growing concern about hyperactivity in children, and later this problem became one of the leading and most debated questions in child psychiatry. There were, of course, a number of circumstances that contributed to this development: 1. Serious exogenous organic mental disorders had decreased in frequency, and borderline forms of psychiatric disturbances had gained significance. 2. Improvements in obstetric techniques had considerably reduced perinatal infant mortality and increased the survival rate of children with perinatal damage of the nervous system. 3 . The growing socialization and urbanization of society that followed in the wake of the qualitative progress brought about by the scientific and technological revolution meant that formal schooling and instruction had become the foundation on which any later coop-