Palombo Response

Palombo Response

by Gabe Adels -
Number of replies: 0

I really appreciate the Palombo article for how it clarifies treatment approaches to children with learning disabilities and differentiates the process from treating children without them. He makes some broad claims that simplify approaches to treatment, but inevitably raise questions. For one, he states that children with neuropsychological deficits almost invariably suffer from some form of anxiety or depression related to the internalized understanding of themselves as inadequate according to the standards by which they are compared to others, in school environments and among peers. Though I agree that this is probably true, it begs the question of whether outliers might exist, and whether the same couldn't be said of those without learning disabilities- that they have internalized shame, to at least some extent, as to how they compare to others within their environments and social contexts. 

The same critique applies to Palombo's perception that therapy should be approached from an "open ended" perspective with learning disabled children, without a beginning, middle, and end. The argument is that more sequential narrative's in therapy might work better with more neuronormative children, which raises the question of whether various disabilities under the neurodivergent umbrella might may be more or less open to "chronological" treatments. A more accurate approach, I think, would be to consider each case in a vacuum, with a web of complexities based on environment and social factors that can't be reduced based on their diagnoses. Also, I think that the "moments" approach to a non-linear therapeutic process probably works best for both neurotypical and atypical cases alike.