According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the condition has no “known clear cause”. Typically, a sufferer often “argues with adults or people in authority”, “actively defies or refuses to comply with adults’ requests or rules”, and “deliberately annoys people”. Adding insult to grievous societal injury, a sufferer is unlikely to see his or her behavior as a problem. Rather, he or she probably believes that unreasonable demands are being placed on him or her. Some of us are proudly ODD. As in Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
V.T., February 2015
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I may be odd — but who’s not odd,
Save fools alike as peas in pod?
Alexander Griboyedov, Woe from Wit (1823)
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Stoner had learned a lot, he said, from him and Mom going to their counseling. New words to help us all get along. Opposition disorder being one of them. Supposedly that was a disease, and I had it. If I wanted to move in here, I’d need to go on the medication to knock some of the wind out of my sails. Evidently I had too much of that in my sails. Wind.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Given that a child develops in the context of relationships, her behavior will be intelligible to us only if we look at the relational environment. Seen this way, these so-called ODD kids turn out to be ones who lack sufficient connection with nurturing adults and have a natural resistance to being controlled by people they do not fully trust or feel close enough to. This aversion, furthermore, is only magnified by all attempts to shame or cajole it into submission. To call this “disordered” says nothing about the child’s inner experience; it reflects only the perspective of the ones who find his recalcitrance inconvenient. It is also completely obtuse about how emotional power dynamics work: there is nothing disordered in resisting authority figures that, for whatever reason, we do not feel confident in and safe with.
Gabor Maté
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I just had to talk back at established authority and that established authority hated backtalk worse than barbed-wire pie.
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on A Road
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Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
Advertisements for thalidomide pictured tranquil nature scenes and touted its benefits as an antidote to workplace stress. By 1960, thalidomide had become the country’s best-selling sedative, used regularly by about 700,000 Germans of all ages; indeed, its use in restless children earned it the dubious nickname of “West Germany’s baby-sitter”. . . . As one contemporary observed in 1975, advertisements for benzodiazepines cast anxiety as a medical problem, making “individual brain chemistry, rather than social conditions, the target for intervention”. . . . Feminist psychologists such as Phyllis Chesler, … author of the landmark Women and Madness, characterized tranquilizers as a tool of social control, thwarting opportunities for lasting social change by putting women in chemical straitjackets, encouraging them to interpret anger and anxieties created by a sexist world as isolated problems.
Andrea Tone, The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers
When people insisted that their sickness and exhaustion, their cancers, miscarriages, and deformed babies, had something to do with Chernobyl, they were diagnosed as afflicted with “radiophobia”, an irrational fear of radiation.
Joanna Macy
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I mean, what would be the appropriate level of emotional response to someone beating you daily or calling you jackass or stupid or molesting you. What would be the nonhysterical response to living in a world where so many are eating dirt and swimming in the sewage system in Port-au-Prince to unclog the drains and find plastic bottles to sell? What would be the appropriate nonhysterical response to people blindfolding other people and walking them around naked on leashes or watching waving people being abandoned on rooftops in a flood? What would be the proper way to experience these things? Hysteria—a word to make women feel insane for knowing what they know.
IT’S MUCH LATER THAN YOU THINK™ 