A Polite Rebuttal to a Diagnosis I Didn’t Ask For

A dear friend — and I do mean dear, though this may be the last time they risk diagnosing me over brunch — recently suggested, with all the benevolent concern of a well-meaning inquisitor, that I might be showing signs of Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

You know the tone: “I say this with love… but have you considered that your refusal to play nicely with institutions might be clinical?”

Let’s set aside the tea and biscuits for a moment and take a scalpel to this charming little pathology. Because if ODD is a diagnosis, then I propose we start diagnosing systems — not people.

When the Empire Diagnoses Its Rebels

Oppositional Defiant Disorder, for those blissfully unscarred by its jargon, refers to a “persistent pattern” of defiance, argumentativeness, rule-breaking, and — the pièce de résistance — resentment of authority. In other words, it is a medical label for being insufficiently obedient.

What a marvel: not only has resistance been de-politicised, it has been medicalised. The refusal to comply is not treated as an ethical stance or a contextual response, but as a defect of the self. The child (or adult) is not resisting something; they are resisting everything, and this — according to the canon — makes them sick.

One wonders: sick according to whom?

Derrida’s Diagnosis: The Binary Fetish

Jacques Derrida, of course, would waste no time in eviscerating the logic at play. ODD depends on a structural binary: compliant/defiant, healthy/disordered, rule-follower/troublemaker. But, as Derrida reminds us, binaries are not descriptive — they are hierarchies in disguise. One term is always elevated; the other is marked, marginal, suspect.

Here, “compliance” is rendered invisible — the assumed baseline, the white space on the page. Defiance is the ink that stains it. But this only works because “normal” has already been declared. The system names itself sane.

Derrida would deconstruct this self-justifying loop and note that disorder exists only in relation to an order that never justifies itself. Why must the subject submit? That’s not up for discussion. The child who asks that question is already halfway to a diagnosis.

Foucault’s Turn: Disciplinary Power and the Clinic as Court

Enter Foucault, who would regard ODD as yet another exquisite specimen in the taxonomy of control. For him, modern power is not exercised through visible violence but through the subtler mechanisms of surveillance, normalisation, and the production of docile bodies.

ODD is a textbook case of biopower — the system’s ability to define and regulate life itself through classification, diagnosis, and intervention. It is not enough for the child to behave; they must believe. They must internalise authority to the marrow. To question it, or worse, to resent it, is to reveal one’s pathology.

This is not discipline; this is soulcraft. And ODD is not a disorder — it is a symptom of a civilisation that cannot tolerate unmediated subjectivity. See Discipline & Punish.

Ivan Illich: The Compulsory Institutions of Care

Illich would call the whole charade what it is: a coercive dependency masquerading as therapeutic care. In Deschooling Society, he warns of systems — especially schools — that render people passive recipients of norms. ODD, in this light, is not a syndrome. It is the final gasp of autonomy before it is sedated.

What the diagnosis reveals is not a child in crisis, but an institution that cannot imagine education without obedience. Illich would applaud the so-called defiant child for doing the one thing schools rarely reward: thinking.

R.D. Laing: Sanity as a Political Position

Laing, too, would recognise the ruse. His anti-psychiatry position held that “madness” is often the only sane response to a fundamentally broken world. ODD is not insanity — it is sanity on fire. It is the refusal to adapt to structures that demand submission as a prerequisite for inclusion.

To quote Laing: “They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.”

ODD is what happens when a child refuses to play the game.

bell hooks: Refusal as Liberation

bell hooks, writing in Teaching to Transgress, framed the classroom as a potential site of radical transformation — if it rejects domination. The child who refuses to be disciplined is often the one who sees most clearly that the system has confused education with indoctrination.

Resistance, hooks argues, is not a flaw. It is a form of knowledge. ODD becomes, in this frame, a radical pedagogy. The defiant student is not failing — they are teaching.

Deleuze & Guattari: Desire Against the Machine

And then, should you wish to watch the diagnostic edifice melt entirely, we summon Deleuze and Guattari. For them, the psyche is not a plumbing system with blockages, but a set of desiring-machines short-circuiting the factory floor of capitalism and conformity.

ODD, to them, would be schizoanalysis in action — a body refusing to be plugged into the circuits of docility. The tantrum, the refusal, the eye-roll: these are not symptoms. They are breakdowns in the control grid.

The child isn’t disordered — the system is. The child simply noticed.

Freire: The Educated Oppressed

Lastly, Paulo Freire would ask: What kind of pedagogy demands the death of resistance? In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he warns of an education model that treats students as empty vessels. ODD, reframed, is the moment a subject insists on being more than a receptacle.

In refusing the “banking model” of knowledge, the so-called defiant child is already halfway to freedom. Freire would call this not a disorder but a moment of awakening.

Conclusion: Diagnostic Colonialism

So yes, dear friend — I am oppositional. I challenge authority, especially when it mistakes its position for truth. I argue, question, resist. I am not unwell for doing so. I am, if anything, allergic to the idea that obedience is a virtue in itself.

Let us be clear: ODD is not a mirror held up to the subject. It is a spotlight shining from the system, desperately trying to blind anyone who dares to squint.

Now, shall we talk about your compliance disorder?

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Full Disclosure: I used ChatGPT for insights beyond Derrida and Foucault, two of my mainstays.