Karel Pančocha

Accessible Substance Abuse Prevention for All Children

Even though moderate declines in the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (ATOD) among adolescents have been seen over the years, the battle to prevent youth from using ATOD is still a focus for educators and researchers. The primary means of preventing ATOD is still through educational settings and school-based programs. However, the effectiveness of prevention efforts is substantially enhanced when the entire community is involved. Children with disabilities or children who have nontraditional learning styles are still not receiving prevention geared specifically toward their personal needs. This is despite research indicating that the presence of a physical, mental, or psychological disability places an individual at increased risk for substance abuse problems. This chapter outlines risk factors experienced by children with disabilities, community and psychosocial approaches to effective school-based intervention programs, and concludes with a discussion of the Prevention through Alternative Learning Styles (PALS) program that has shown much success since it was developed in 1992.

Building the Czechoslovak nation and sacralizing peoples’ health: the vicissitudes of disability discourse during the 1920s

Abstract During the interwar period, the sacred meaning of health was refined and disseminated due to mutual efforts from both international and national stakeholders in different countries. This text aims to identify and explore the main pathways of connecting the discourse of health to the nation’s identity as a substitute for traditional religion in Czechoslovakia during the 1920s, a period during which institutions were created and new discourses about health were promoted. By investigating the primary discourses and policies concerning people with disabilities, we deconstruct the concept of functional health as used by Czechoslovak ideologists, in their attempts to connect health and labour as the grounds for building the nation. We trace how the concept of functional health and disability as inability to work operated in favour of delegitimizing the Roma as a nation and establishing tough strategies of surveillance of the Roma population.