To those who often choose to go against the norm, be warned: The psychiatric profession just dubbed non-conformity a “disorder.”

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, defines “oppositional defiant disorder,” or ODD, as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior.” Basically, it just labeled anyone who deviates from what is regarded as the norm mentally ill.

Given the ambiguity of the disorder’s definition, almost any behavior perceived by someone else as strange or bothersome might be categorized as a symptom of ODD. For instance, children who often throw tantrums or pick fights with others their age could be declared to have this “illness.” This fails to take into account, however, the fact that disobedience is a common behavior among kids, and not at all a symptom of something akin to a disorder. If that were the case, Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, for example, whose unconventional behaviors and ways of thinking might have raised some brows in their day, might be declared to have ODD.

Another danger to using the term disorder so loosely is the fact that it could curtail freedom of speech and political dissent. In fact, according to Natural News, “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.”

Psychiatry or tyranny?

In the former USSR, authorities used the medical system to control and regulate citizens’ thoughts. It implemented mental health programs that categorized dissenters as impaired and in need of mind-altering drugs that often had 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.”

Sources used:

NaturalNews.com

JAAPL.org^[PDF]