INTRODUCTION
About this text
Fourteen fictional teaching cases, each followed by four chapters: epidemiology, presentation, functional neuroscience, and treatment.
Gerrit van Schalkwyk, MD
About this text
Every case is fictional and composed for teaching; no child, family, or clinician described here exists. Each case anchors four chapters that return to it: what the population figures say about a presentation like this one, what can be observed and what is only inferred, how the child's experience and behavior can be described as functional variables (capacities, processes, states, and representations) and related to circuits, development, and genes, and what treatment evidence does and does not establish. Every chapter ends by saying what the case cannot establish.
Three cases (Maya, Jonah, Luis) and the functional vocabulary throughout are carried over from the author's Pediatric Clinical Neuroscience edition.
This is an educational text, not a clinical decision tool. It describes evidence and reasoning about fictional children; it does not give treatment advice for any real person.
Contents
| Module | Disorder | Case |
|---|---|---|
| 00 | Reading the numbers (opening chapter on epidemiology) | — |
| 01 | Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder | Tomas, 9 |
| 02 | Autism spectrum disorder | Luca, 6 |
| 03 | Intellectual disability | Maya, 8 |
| 04 | Depressive disorders | Jonah, 15 |
| 05 | Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder | Owen, 8 |
| 06 | Bipolar disorder | Simone, 16 |
| 07 | Anxiety disorders | Marcus, 13 |
| 08 | Obsessive-compulsive and related disorders | Nadia, 14 |
| 09 | Tic disorders | Elias, 9 |
| 10 | Oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder | Luis, 10 |
| 11 | Intermittent explosive disorder | Jasmine, 15 |
| 12 | Psychotic disorders | Ravi, 16 |
| 13 | Feeding and eating disorders | Mateo, 15 |
| 14 | Trauma- and stressor-related disorders | Theo, 9 |