Monday, March 5, 2012

Oppositional Defiant Disorder or Anti-Authoritarianism?

Anarchy (even theocratic anarchy, as portrayed in the biblical Book of Judges) hasn't worked very well, but it's still a valid political viewpoint...if your parents (a) happen to support you in it, and (b) are able to send you to a supportive school, or (c) have the background necessary to tell greedy school employees they will not be allowed to sedate you as an alternative to teaching you anything worthwhile.

Bruce Levine considers the horrible prospects for those who don't meet these criteria, from the viewpoint of a practicing psychologist:

http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagnosed-as-mentally-ill/

In a way this whole website amounts to documentation for one of Emily Dickinson's better-known poems: "Much madness is divinest Sense to a discerning eye; much 'sense' the starkest madness--'tis the majority in this, as all, prevail."

However, it's worth reading the comments to see the kind of sick mental frame your (perfectly normal) rebellious teenager may be up against. If a seven-year-old resists learning to read, he's not psychotic? someone asks, obviously intending it as a rhetorical question. Well, actually, if a seven-year-old resists learning to read, perhaps the most likely explanation is that he's one of the majority of boys whose eyes really aren't ready to focus on normal-sized print for very long before age ten...and a subsidiary factor may well be that his parents and teachers have slipped into an adversarial relationship that makes him feel that he "has to defend himself" against being bullied into reading.

Maybe we need to reconstruct the whole question. If someone who appears to be an adult thinks he can make the decision that someone else needs to learn to read, for that person, without consulting that person, he's not psychotic? Maybe instead of worrying about kids having "oppositional defiant disorders" we need to worry about adults who are obviously really suffering from "obsession-with-controlling-others disorder." Maybe they're the ones who need the stupefying sedatives, and if they don't like it maybe they also need the feel-good pills that generate the intense muscle cramps and the bizarre fantasies of abuse that would have caused that kind of muscle cramps.

Just don't let them out of the hospital unless they're flanked by a couple of caretakers who can subdue them if they start to become violent.

No comments:

Post a Comment