Oppositional Defiant Disorder: The Psy Apparatuses and Youth Resistance

ABSTRACT

This article, situated in Foucauldian, anti-psychiatry, and mad studies literature, provides a theoretical intervention into the practice complexities and complicities of working with young people marked with the diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder. Using a composite vignette as a proxy for social work practice, I map the particular harms of the deployment of the oppositional defiant disorder diagnosis, using Foucault and others to provide insight, in order to reorder and rethink work with young people marked as disorderly. Scholars effectively trace the manifold harms of the psychiatrization of young people; this article knits together the ways in which these harms operate, with the expressed intention of psychiatrizing youth resistance through multiple targets. The article concludes with tentative formulations for reconceptualizing youth resistance, in particular, using contributions from Sara Ahmed’s work on willfulness and Eve Tuck’s work on dangerous dignities. My aim is to use these emerging formulations to position our work with young people in alignment with their own resistance to injustice, rather than in concert with the efforts to psychiatrize their actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Biopolitical governmentality
• oppositional defiant disorder
• psy apparatus
• youth mental health
• youth resistance

Notes

¹ The psy apparatuses are the discourses and operations of power of psychology, psychiatry, social work, and other disciplines that constitute and govern the “mad” and “disordered” subject, shaped by and set against the constitution of the “sane” and “normal” subject (Foucault, 2003b, 2006; Rose, 1998).

² In fact, this type of resistance is often not coded as resistance. It is coded as deviance to be managed and contained, and the subject is shaped into “pro-social behavior.”