Give them more pills
A Tumblr account came up today in spamwatch for an “Oppositional Defiance Disorder” blog. That sounded like bullshit, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia:
The diagnostic criteria for this disorder are as follows:[…] The DSM-IV cites a prevalence of 2-16% for ODD.
- Deliberately annoying people
- Blaming others for own mistakes
- Easily annoyed
- Angry and resentful
- Spiteful or even vengeful
Sadly, I’m sure tons of kids are being medicated for this.
When I was a kid, we called those kids “annoying” or “assholes”. At what point do personality flaws (often caused by parenting flaws) become a “disorder”?
I didn’t do my homework in school because I’m smart and lazy. Is there a disorder for that now? (That’s not ADD, although smart and lazy people are frequently misdiagnosed with ADD.)
My frustrated mother brought me to a psychologist for a couple of years during high school, thinking there was some psychological problem that could be overcome and I’d start doing my homework. I thought he was ineffective and useless, but he was spot-on: he told my mother that there was nothing wrong with me, and I was just lazy.
Instead of borrowing against my future mental and physical health by being a medicated zombie throughout my childhood, I was just given mediocre grades and my mother grounded me a lot. Looking back on it, that was definitely the right course of action compared to any medicated alternatives.