Older article (2012), but still very relevant and valid.
In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.
Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops, all of which require much behavioral and attentional compliance to authorities, even to those authorities that one lacks respect for. The selection and socialization of mental health professionals tends to breed out many anti-authoritarians.
Psychologist Russell Barkley, one of mainstream mental health’s leading authorities on ADHD, says that those afflicted with ADHD have deficits in what he calls “rule-governed behavior,” as they are less responsive to rules of established authorities and less sensitive to positive or negative consequences. ODD young people, according to mainstream mental health authorities, also have these so-called deficits in rule-governed behavior, and so it is extremely common for young people to have a “dual diagnosis” of AHDH and ODD.
Do we really want to diagnose and medicate everyone with “deficits in rule-governed behavior”?
It’s just fundamentally not a disorder to dislike authority. It’s not a disorder to be upset about things that have happened to you, or to react strongly or emotionally to oppression. I find it so exhausting that in order to receive support and needed accommodations people are forced to basically label parts of their experiences as diseased or extraordinary and accept forever-stigmatization of them. It makes me fucking ill.
It’s not a mental disorder to simply be anti-authority, but it can be pathological. Not to take away from your point or anything, but I have a true story about a kid who went to college with my wife.
He was a real prat who didn’t like being told what to do, and he seemed to take perverse pleasure in antagonizing authority figures who couldn’t directly punish him and who he considered to be beneath him. For instance, he would frequently leave his messy plates out at the dining hall, because he knew there would be no consequences for him, and he wanted the staff to have to clean up after him.
Or this one time where the RA in the dorm was explaining how to choose a room for next year because everyone had to move out, he had a zippo lighter and was just throwing it up and catching it, and occasionally letting it fall to the ground and make a loud noise. He ignored instructions to stop doing that because it’s obnoxious, because the RA was an authority with no power, so was beneath him.
All in all, cowardly behavior, and while I’m not a psychiatrist, and I cannot diagnose him, it certainly sounds like ODD to me.
Anyway, this piece of shit’s name is Stephen Miller.
I get this, some people are just the worst and hard to be around for whatever reason, and some of them can stop their behavior easily and others need support to do that- but i do object to categorizing and labelling and medicating and policing these people. Some people just fucking suck. But they have the right to suck and deserve neither to be relegated to a label in an oppressive way OR as in a way they can use as an excuse to avoid accountability for being shitty to others. Medicalizing weird or rude behavior has lots of effects that harm everyone, asshole and non asshole. The categories are socially determined, so assholes with power do not get categorized like that anyway. It’s mostly marginalized people who end up with those labels following them around and affecting how they are treated by others.
Fuck stephen miller though, for sure. Confirmed bigoted asshole.