Oppositional defiant disorder or teenage rebellion?

Damn fine written piece.
Society has placed a stranglehold on kids and young adults that stigmatizes any kind of deviation from the straight laced obedience that only 10% of the population can achieve through their native constitution. That we ask people to sometimes constrain their natural impulses to run an orderly society is acceptable. But to stigmatize up to 30 percent of kids with disease is unreasonalbe.

I am a mid-life psychiatrist who was normal enough to get an education with high marks, stay out of jail, get and stay married raise good kids, and basically funcition pretty decently.

Yet I see kids labeled as severely impaired, loaded on meds, and even hospitalized for things that I did as a kid–and they weren’t even that remarkable back then in my hometown–I was one of the good kids.

Even as we have come to accept and even glorify bizarre tatoos, economic irresponsibility, and gender identity confusion, the more ordinary deviations of growing up have been widely pathologized.

Our educational culture has become profoundly hostile to normal male children.

There is still not a shred of evidence that medical or psychotherapeutic treatment is effective for antisocial behavior.

Kids act up. Some more than others. Hold them responsible for the consequences. If they are dangerous to other kids, don’t let them around them.

A lot of these kids who are getting absolutely nothing out antipsychotics and stimulants would get a world of good out of being sent off to do farm and ranch work for a few years.

Somehow, I cannot conjure up the picture of an ADD child walking along beside a covered wagon. How do you suppose those children made it over the Rockies without any Ritalin? Must have been that parents had control of their children and social workers were not hiding behind every rock.

Some of those parents didn’t have “control”, it was just that the child wasn’t being asked to do what he was developmentally unsuited for–sit in a classroom and pay attention, but rather was allowed–required in fact if he hoped to survive–to do what came naturally to him: stay in motion.

As long as he didn’t attack the livestock, he could run circles around the wagon, go off poking around, whatever and it wasn’t a problem.

It is not the kids that are abnormal, but the environment that we have created for them.