In my career as a
psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by
other professionals
with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder,
anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how
many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians,
and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.
Anti-authoritarians
question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority
seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether
or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and
care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when
anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and
resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes
passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.
Some activists lament how
few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason
could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and
medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most
oppressive authorities.
Why Mental
Health Professionals Diagnose Anti-Authoritarians with Mental Illness
Gaining acceptance into
graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or
psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops, all of which require much
behavioral and attentional compliance to authorities, even to those authorities
that one lacks respect for. The selection and socialization of mental health
professionals tends to breed out many anti-authoritarians. Having steered the
higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and
credentials are primarily badges of compliance. Those with extended schooling
have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the
demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs and PhDs, people different from them
who reject this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another
world—a diagnosable one.
I have found that most
psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are not
only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the
magnitude of their obedience. And it also has become clear to me that the anti-authoritarianism
of their patients creates enormous anxiety for these professionals, and their
anxiety fuels diagnoses and treatments.
In graduate school, I
discovered that all it took to be labeled as having “issues with authority” was
to not kiss up to a director of clinical training whose personality was a
combination of Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and Howard Cosell. When I was told
by some faculty that I had “issues with authority,” I had mixed feelings about
being so labeled. On the one hand, I found it quite amusing, because among the
working-class kids whom I had grown up with, I was considered relatively
compliant with authorities. After all, I had done my homework, studied, and
received good grades. However, while my new “issues with authority” label made
me grin because I was now being seen as a “bad boy,” it also very much
concerned me about just what kind of a profession that I had entered.
Specifically, if somebody such as myself was being labeled with “issues with
authority,” what were they calling the kids I grew up with who paid attention
to many things that they cared about but didn’t care enough about school to
comply there? Well, the answer soon became clear.
Mental
Illness Diagnoses for Anti-Authoritarians
A 2009 Psychiatric Times article titled “ADHD
& ODD: Confronting the Challenges of Disruptive Behavior” reports that “disruptive
disorders,” which include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and
opposition defiant disorder (ODD), are the most common mental health problem of
children and teenagers. ADHD is defined by poor attention and distractibility,
poor self-control and impulsivity, and hyperactivity. ODD is defined as a “a
pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior without the more serious
violations of the basic rights of others that are seen in conduct disorder”;
and ODD symptoms include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult
requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.”
Psychologist Russell
Barkley, one of mainstream mental health’s leading authorities on ADHD, says
that those afflicted with ADHD have deficits in what he calls “rule-governed
behavior,” as they are less responsive to rules of established authorities and
less sensitive to positive or negative consequences. ODD young people,
according to mainstream mental health authorities, also have these so-called
deficits in rule-governed behavior, and so it is extremely common for young
people to have a “duel diagnosis” of AHDH and ODD.
Do we really want to
diagnose and medicate everyone with “deficits in rule-governed behavior”?
Albert Einstein, as a
youth, would have likely received an ADHD diagnosis, and maybe an ODD one as
well. Albert didn’t pay attention to his teachers, failed his college entrance
examinations twice, and had difficulty holding jobs. However, Einstein
biographer Ronald Clark (Einstein: The
Life and Times) asserts that Albert’s problems did not stem from
attention deficits but rather from his hatred of authoritarian, Prussian
discipline in his schools. Einstein said, “The teachers in the elementary
school appeared to me like sergeants and in the Gymnasium the teachers were
like lieutenants.” At age 13, Einstein read Kant’s difficult Critique of Pure Reason—because Albert
was interested in it. Clark
also tells us Einstein refused to prepare himself for his college admissions as
a rebellion against his father’s “unbearable” path of a “practical profession.”
After he did enter college, one professor told Einstein, “You have one fault;
one can’t tell you anything.” The very characteristics of Einstein that upset
authorities so much were exactly the ones that allowed him to excel.
By today’s standards,
Saul Alinsky, the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would have certainly been diagnosed
with one or more disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said,
“I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off
the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Alinsky also recalls a time when
he was ten or eleven and his rabbi was tutoring him in Hebrew:
One particular day I read
three pages in a row without any errors in pronunciation, and suddenly a penny
fell onto the Bible . . . Then the next day the rabbi turned up and he told me
to start reading. And I wouldn’t; I just sat there in silence, refusing to
read. He asked me why I was so quiet, and I said, “This time it’s a nickel or
nothing.” He threw back his arm and slammed me across the room.
Many people with severe
anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of
their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their
contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and
socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate
authorities will cause them existential death.
I have also spent a great
deal of time with people who had at one time in their lives had thoughts and
behavior that were so bizarre that they were extremely frightening for their
families and even themselves; they were diagnosed with schizophrenia and other
psychoses, but have fully recovered and have been, for many years, leading
productive lives. Among this population, I have not met one person whom I would
not consider a major anti-authoritarian. Once recovered, they have learned to
channel their anti-authoritarianism into more constructive political ends,
including reforming mental health treatment.
Many anti-authoritarians
who earlier in their lives were diagnosed with mental illness tell me that once
they were labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis, they got caught in a dilemma.
Authoritarians, by definition, demand unquestioning obedience, and so any
resistance to their diagnosis and treatment created enormous anxiety for
authoritarian mental health professionals; and professionals, feeling out of
control, labeled them “noncompliant with treatment,” increased the severity of
their diagnosis, and jacked up their medications. This was enraging for these
anti-authoritarians, sometimes so much so that they reacted in ways that made
them appear even more frightening to their families.
There are
anti-authoritarians who use psychiatric drugs to help them function, but they often
reject psychiatric authorities’ explanations for why they have difficulty
functioning. So, for example, they may take Adderall (an amphetamine prescribed
for ADHD), but they know that their attentional problem is not a result of a
biochemical brain imbalance but rather caused by a boring job. And similarly,
many anti-authoritarians in highly stressful environments will occasionally
take prescribed benzodiazepines such as Xanax even though they believe it would
be safer to occasionally use marijuana but can’t because of drug testing on
their job
It has been my experience
that many anti-authoritarians labeled with psychiatric diagnoses usually don’t
reject all authorities,
simply those they’ve assessed to be illegitimate ones, which just happens to be
a great deal of society’s authorities.
Maintaining
the Societal Status Quo
Americans have been
increasingly socialized to equate inattention, anger, anxiety, and immobilizing
despair with a medical condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than political
remedies. What better way to maintain the status quo than to view
inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those
who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly
authoritarian society.
The reality is that
depression is highly associated with societal and financial pains. One is much
more likely to be depressed if one is unemployed, underemployed, on public
assistance, or in debt (for documentation, see “400%
Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use”). And ADHD labeled kids do pay attention
when they are getting paid, or when an activity is novel, interests them, or is
chosen by them (documented in my book Commonsense
Rebellion).
In an earlier dark age,
authoritarian monarchies partnered with authoritarian religious institutions.
When the world exited from this dark age and entered the Enlightenment, there
was a burst of energy. Much of this revitalization had to do with risking
skepticism about authoritarian and corrupt institutions and regaining
confidence in one’s own mind. We are now in another dark age, only the
institutions have changed. Americans desperately need anti-authoritarians to
question, challenge, and resist new illegitimate authorities and regain
confidence in their own common sense.
In every generation there
will be authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. While it is unusual in American
history for anti-authoritarians to take the kind of effective action that
inspires others to successfully revolt, every once in a while a Tom Paine,
Crazy Horse, or Malcolm X come along. So authoritarians financially marginalize
those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they
psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.”
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In my career as a
psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by
other professionals
with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder,
anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how
many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians,
and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.
