Society's Child
The so-called "condition" for why a person might choose to resist conformity has been labeled by the psychiatric profession as "oppositional defiant disorder," or ODD. The new DSM defines this made-up disease as an "ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior," and also lumps it in alongside attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, another made-up condition whose creator, Dr. Leon Eisenberg, admitted it to be phony on his death bed.
As you might suspect from this type of open-ended description, almost any personal behavior perceived by someone else to be undesirable or strange might be categorized as symptomatic of ODD. Children who throw temper tantrums or fight with their siblings, for instance, might be declared to have this supposed mental illness, as might children who express disagreement with their parents or teachers.
Disobedience and defiance are common behaviors among young children, and parents have long dealt with such behaviors by exercising proper discipline. At the same time, not all forms of disobedience and defiance are wrong, depending on the authority involved and the action petitioned. A child who is told by his teacher to keep his unpopular opinions to himself, for instance, and who resists this order might simply be exercising his freedom to express disagreement.
But that's the problem with categorizing conditions like ODD so loosely, as virtually any uncommon behavior can be declared to be oppositional or defiant simply because it bucks the status quo. Famous minds of the past like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, for instance, whose unconventional ideas might have seemed crazy in their day, are the types of folks who today might be declared to have ODD or some other type of mental disease.
An even greater danger to using this subjective approach in the diagnosis of mental illness is that it threatens to curtail freedom of speech and political dissent. The federal government has already tried to declare those who oppose its tyrannical policies, or who simply question them, as having "political paranoia," a type of mental illness.
Characterizing non-conformity as 'mental illness' a hallmark of totalitarian government
Such outlandish abuse of the medical system for controlling popular thought is nothing new. Many authoritarian governments, including the former USSR, implemented similar mental health programs that categorized dissenters as having chemical imbalances in need of a remedy. Today, that remedy is often mind-altering, psychotropic drugs with devastating side effects.
"Psychiatric incarceration of mentally healthy people is uniformly understood to be a particularly pernicious form of repression, because it uses the powerful modalities of medicine as tools of punishment, and it compounds a deep affront to human rights with deception and fraud," explains a 2002 analysis and commentary on the abuse of psychiatry in both the Soviet Union and China that was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.
"Doctors who allow themselves to be used in this way... betray the trust of society and breach their most basic ethical obligations as professionals."
You can view this study, which has powerful implications for what the psychiatric profession is becoming today, here: http://jaapl.org.
Comment: Religious fundamentalism could soon be treated as mental illness
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Reader Comments
Unobtainium Fever, though, blinds and distorts all who choose to seize more than they are fairly able to obtain.
Being malcontent with what they do have, the wrong seeds are sown.
And so the snowball of greed rolls downhill into the pits of evil ways.
"Disobedience and defiance are common behaviors among young children, and parents have long dealt with such behaviors by exercising proper discipline...."
I'll take it further. It is how children become adults -- by testing limits. It is both healthy and normal.
When I was in high school, I had two teachers -- in algebra and chemistry -- who used me as a pawn. They deliberately wrote incorrect equations on the blackboard. I was the only one who challenged them. The teachers then proceeded to (fake) argue with me, and then they asked for a show of hands on who was right. No one ever sided with me.
Then the teachers excoriated the other students! It didn't exactly make me popular with them.
On other occasions, teachers were less than delighted when I pointed out errors in textbooks.
Just the opposite happened on another occasion. In a history class, a student pointed out that the word "partner" was spelled "pardner" in the textbook. The teacher effusively praised him. I then pointed out that it was not a textbook error -- the misspelled word appeared in a written quotation. The teacher was less than effusive in his acknowledgement of my correction.
Is it ODD that I became a 9/11 Dissident?
ADHD is also completely real. You are absolutely so unable to concentrate on one thing that it becomes frustrating. It's kind of like a spiderweb. You start in the middle with the thing you want to focus on, but then it branches onto something somewhat related over and over again.
For Example: If I needed to write an English paper. This is my thought process:
"Is this grammatically correct?" "Why in the world would anyone develop a language this confusing?" "It's Latin based, so- CRAP. I HAVE LATIN HOMEWORK." "What did we have to do? 4E or something?" "Are we even ON chapter 4?" "No, that's Geometry..." "Ugh, I have to do an extra credit project because my grades in that class suck-" "CRAP. FOCUS. TEST. GO." "I'm going to fail this." "I'm going to fail Geometry, too if I don't finish that flipping project."
You get the idea. It happens over and over again, but all of these thoughts happen so quickly in your head, 20 minutes could've passed and you think it's only been 2.
Stop trying to spew a bunch of nonsense about things you're too ignorant or narrow-minded to so much as contemplate, let alone try to be an adult and think about the opposing side feels about your argument and whether your feeble mind is ACTUALLY right, or you'd just like to believe it is because that's A) What you were taught by OTHER narrow-minded people, or, B) You're just saying random things because you decided "There's no way that that's a real thing. People are idiots and I know I'm right because it's how I feel and anyone who doesn't feel the same way as me is wrong."
PLEASE, for the sake of humanity, GROW. UP.
Great comments. Humanity is late in growing up. Each person can make the difference. Keep focused to stay clean.
Stay clean to keep focused!
The 'GOD disorder' (ego) is what puts all the other disorders on the map.
The ego is a primitve, mental form of God, which modern, war and technology loving humans, rather than correctly recognizing as primitive and transitory, and subject to limited time and limitedspace, have placed on the highest altar of their worship and deviant and crude, technological and morbid and cruel fixations.
We see this result.
Meanwhile, the map is never the territory, in total. Just as the ego is most assuredly not God, in truth.
Have a nice day, suckers.
ned