Tag: oppositional defiant disorder

A podcast interview with Finnish psychiatrist Ben Furman in which he discusses adolescent rage and how parents can come to understand and deal with teenagers and young adults who are angry and explosive.

Early in The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine attacks the hypocrisy of religious professionals. If alive today, Paine may well have been even rougher on psychiatrists. He revered science, and he would have been enraged by professionals who make pseudoscientific proclamations.

Love-me liberals need to believe that they are completely tolerant and cannot admit that they are intolerant when it comes to certain kinds of defiance. Since love-me liberals are so self-certain of their tolerance, they believe that what upsets them must be a mental illness that requires treatment.

Political, educational, and mental health fields are joining forces in ever more powerful authoritarian rule. The DSM, proclaimed to be a scientific guidebook, is little more than a political instrument used to control undesirable behaviors and experiences. Who will fight for our rights when everybody is tranquilized into conformity?

In this piece for Alternet, psychologist Bruce Levine explores why Mental Health Professionals often diagnose anti-authoritarians with mental illness.

As I settle into my role as the editor for parent resources here at Mad in America, I’m reaching out to folks who have something to contribute to the conversation and asking them if they would be willing to condense what they know into a Ten Tips format for easy digestion and comprehension. The first four are now available.

Is every defiant child a freedom fighter? Of course not. Disrupting your fourth grade class is not the same as embarking on the underground railway. But is oppositional defiant disorder a label meant to subjugate and to serve the needs of the authorities? Yes, absolutely.

Coercion — the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance — is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling, and parenting, but it isn’t to less “civilized” societies. Coercion fuels miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we today call mental illness. Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, in Schizophrenia and Civilization, states “Schizophrenia appears to be a disease of civilization.” But Torrey is a strong advocate for coercive treatments, including forced medication — even though his own research shows a stronger relationship between severe mental illness and European-American civilization than with hypothesized biochemical agents that have never been found. Still, he has he not considered the toxic effects of coercion.