Students who talk to scientists and experts about their own physical and mental limitations. That is the aim of the new podcast Het Leven uit een Dag. ‘I want to lower the threshold for seeking support,’ says initiator Sophie Theunissen.
In the first episode of The Life of a Day the listener gets a glimpse into a day of Sophie Theunissen at Radboud University. She has ADHD and this obstacle has had a lot of influence on her studies in communication science, which she recently completed.
Theunissen wanted to pay attention to mental and physical problems in students and that is why she wrote a plan for the podcast. In collaboration with Radboud Student Welfare, it can now be listened to via Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The first season has four episodes, each month a new topic is covered.
In between her own experience stories, Sophie asks questions to healthcare psychologist Joris van Neijenhof about the science behind ADHD. ‘With this podcast I want to create more connection between practice and science, but also lower the threshold for seeking support,’ says Theunissen.
Enrichment
Theunissen knows the prejudices about ADHD like no other. “It’s not a prison, but an enrichment,” she explains. By this she means that there are sometimes advantages to having ADHD, but the emphasis should certainly also be on the negative impact of it. “I have a problem with the words ‘mental disability’, but I also don’t want it to be seen as just a cool thing.”
‘Writing about ADHD helped me a lot’
A year ago, Sophie ended up in a burnout that lasted eight months: ‘I couldn’t get any more information into my head,’ she says. During that period she started looking for answers to questions such as how ADHD works and whether it could play a role in the fact that she was exhausted. Theunissen came across many podcasts and blogs, but these were all made from the perspective of, for example, people over 50 or mothers – stories aimed at students were hard to find.
So she started writing down her own experiences. That helped enormously, Sophie noticed. And now there is the podcast, which she hopes will help studying listeners deal with their own problems.
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