Background: Roughly one third of disability pensions in Norway are issued for mental and behavioral disorders, and vocational rehabilitation offered to this group has traditionally been dominated by train-and-place approaches with assisted or sheltered employment. Based on a more innovative place-and-train approach, Individual Placement and Support (IPS) involves supported employment in real-life competitive work settings, and has shown great promise for patients with severe mental illness.
This paper analyses the construction of Norwegian couples' sexuality through the study of a publically financed and organised relationship course called Living Well Together (Godt Samliv). Established in 2005, this relationship course aimed at first-time parent couples is offered free of charge by municipal health centres. Scrutiny of national policy documents and political debate and of the course handbooks presented to couples, makes visible a particular Norwegian discourse on sexuality, which stresses gender equality and neutrality and ideas of inclusive democratization. New parents are advised to make active efforts to maintain a loving, lasting relationship and sexuality, for the sake of the children. The idea of sex implied by this couples relationship policy is based on what might be described as a 'duty of spontaneity', presented as a work both parents should undertake in order to achieve a stable and healthy relationship. We argue, however, that the inclusive rhetoric of diversity that characterises this public form of Norwegian sexuality has its limitations and that certain forms of intimacy and sexuality are excluded from this discourse.
In this article we analyse the central features of the establishment and development in Norway of a mental health service for children. Influenced by the movements for mental hygiene and child guidance from the 1920s, Norwegian psychiatrists turned their attention increasingly towards prevention of mental and social problems. During the 1930s, IQ-testing and segregation of troublesome children from school became an important tool for handling children with mental or behavioural problems. With increasing public attention, child mental health activities grew from the late 1940s, and the first regular therapeutic clinic for children was established in 1947. Therapeutic ideas derived from psychoanalytical theory and applied in the new clinics, challenged the dominant view of segregation as a solution to mental and social problems. From 1961 a comprehensive mental healthcare service for children was developed in Norway, and the aim of therapeutic treatment changed gradually from segregation to integration.
In Sweden, Norway and Denmark national testing communities advocating the introduction and expanded use of standardised educational tests in the national educational systems emerged around World War I. Using international research and cross-border networking activities, these coteries were able to gain power and thus establish and promote a new profession, the educational psychologist, along with instituting practices of alleged scientific tests in the following decades.
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