Are the young people that Shrinks label as "Disruptive",

[Joe Shlabotnik]

Are the Young People That Shrinks Label as Disruptive Really Anarchists with a Healthy Resistance to Oppressive Authority?
From AlterNet, June 14, 2013, by Bruce E. Levine

Many young people diagnosed with mental disorders have acted on their beliefs in ways that threaten authorities.

Many young people diagnosed with mental disorders are essentially anarchists who have the bad luck of being misidentified by mental health professionals, who 1) are ignorant of the social philosophy of anarchism; 2) embrace, often without political consciousness, its opposite ideology of hierarchism; and 3) confuse the signs of anarchism with symptoms of mental illness.

The mass media equates anarchism with chaos and violence. However, the social philosophy of anarchism rejects authoritarian government, opposes coercion, strives for greatest freedom, works toward “mutual aid” and voluntary cooperation, and maintains that people organizing themselves without hierarchies creates the most satisfying social arrangement. Many anarchists adhere to the principle of nonviolence (though the question of violence has historically divided anarchists in their battle to eliminate authoritarianism). Nonviolent anarchists have energized the Occupy movement and other struggles for economic justice and freedom.

In practice, anarchism is not a dogmatic system. So for example, “practical anarchist” parents will use their authority to grab their child who has begun to run out into traffic. However, practical anarchists strongly believe that all authorities have the burden of proof to justify control, and that most authorities in modern society cannot bear that burden and are thus illegitimate—and should be eliminated and replaced by noncoercive, freely participating relationships.

My experience as a clinical psychologist for almost three decades is that many young people labeled with psychiatric diagnoses are essentially anarchists in spirit who are pained, anxious, depressed, and angered by coercion, unnecessary rules, and illegitimate authority. An often-used psychiatric diagnosis for children and adolescents is oppositional defiant disorder (ODD); its symptoms include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.”

The rest at:http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/anarchists-oppressed-psychiatry-and-underground-resistance

[riverwalker]

1. reminds me of "The Politics of Experience"

by Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. He was all the rage in the sixties.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. This was so "me", growing up as a teen.

My father was an authoritarian by nature and expecting my mother and my sibs to do whatever he said without thinking.

Problem: I thought and I knew I couldn't trust his judgment. I transferred that distrust to other authority figures as teachers and principals. And I went through the hallways without a pass because the rules were meant for others who needed the rules, not me. Talked back to teachers. Argued logic and reason (unsuccessfully) with my parents any chance I could.

My father wanted me to have "intensive psychological therapy" which could have meant electroshock therapy, who knows? He mistook my rejection of his authority as arbitrary, (probably hormonal) and more toward Oppositional Defiant Disorder. He didn't listen to me and I seemed to make him extraordinarily angry.

You remember the scene in the producers room in "Tootsie" when Dustin Hoffman went off script and they all murmured "Uh oh"? That was my family when my father tried to order me around without thinking and I objected. Collective inhalation of breath and "Uh oh". My brother and sister begged me not to argue with him, but I had to address being told to do something that wasn't in my best interest, had to be followed without thinking, and usually was meant to keep me in place.

It didn't help that I was female as my father had this idea that women (in the Seventies) didn't argue back unless they were shrews or harridans or both. He really saw me as a threat to social order and dedicated himself to quashing me.

We were in a psychological death spiral until I went to college. He did resurrect the worst proclivities on the night before my graduation when he told me I couldn't move to D.C. to start a new life, being obnoxious in front of my friends.

My father's not a "bad guy" but like I said, he's authoritarian and he makes the rules. If anything, I learned to walk away from employers who remind me of him.