Defiance Is Not a Disease

Summer 2003

By Norm Diamond

For the past few months, The Oregonian, our local paper, has been running advertisements directed at parents of "defiant" kids with "Oppositional Defiant Disorder." If you read the fine print, the ad promises "investigational medication."

I would suggest that some of what the ad projects as problems are not necessarily "symptoms," but may be part of establishing independence and developing critical thinking. Equipping children to argue back is part of good parenting and good teaching, even if having them actually practice it can be exasperating.

ODD is a medically recognized syndrome. I'm skeptical that it exists in any society but our own. Even so, it is meant to apply only to extreme cases. We should be wary of the tendency to medicalize what is really social behavior.

These ads are direct appeals to frustrated parents, unmediated by any agency or institution that might suggest an alternative to blaming the kids (or blaming a chemical imbalance in the kids).

When these ads started appearing regularly, our local community newspaper gave some thought to attempting to infiltrate the study, but our usually intrepid high-schoolage investigative reporters blanched when they heard about the possibility of drugs.

Instead I wrote a parody, "Compliance Acquiescent Disorder," which aired on KBOO-FM, our community radio station in Portland and was published in The Portland Alliance. The ads stopped for a while. When they reappeared, they had been rewritten in very modest ways. They no longer mention the name of the doctor heading the study, nor do they promise "comprehensive lab analysis." More significantly, while they list the same "symptoms," they now add two (still inadequate) qualifications: "compared to peers" and "to the degree they interfere with home and school life."

Oh, and KBOO and the Alliance have received a number of calls from potential volunteers worried they've been suffering from CAD.

Norm Diamond (norm@clark.edu) is a labor and education activist in Portland, Ore. He is co-author of The Power in Our Hands, a Curriculum on the History of Work and Workers in the United States and Scarves of Many Colors, Muslim Women and the Veil.

Summer 2003