The Myth of Normal 196

chapters, the world into which kids are being born these days might as well have been designed to promote disruptions of cognitive function and emotional self-regulation. Everything I have seen tells me we are witnessing a sea change in children’s mental well-being. Why, then, do I persist in my critique of the diagnostic model? Because diagnoses reveal nothing about the underlying events and dynamics that animate the perceptions and experiences in question. They keep our gaze trained on effects and not their myriad causes. There could be multiple reasons why a child may have trouble paying attention or be restless, disengaged, and fidgety: anxiety, stresses at home, boredom with material she finds uninteresting, resistance to the constraints of sitting in a classroom, fear of bullying, an authoritarian teacher, trauma—even birth month, believe it or not. A University of British Columbia study looked at the prescription records of almost one million B.C. schoolchildren over an eleven-year period and found that kids born in December were 39 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than classmates born the previous January. The reason? December kids entered the same grade nearly a year younger than their January counterparts—they were eleven months behind in brain development. They were being medicated not for a “genetic brain disorder” but for naturally delayed maturation of the brain circuits of attention and selfregulation.[7] Or consider the DSM-5 diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), often tacked on to ADHD and other “diseases.” “If your child or teenager has a frequent and persistent pattern of anger, irritability, arguing, defiance or vindictiveness toward you and other authority figures, he or she may have oppositional defiant disorder,” advises the Mayo Clinic.[8] The clue is in the word “toward”: oppositionality, by definition, can arise only in the context of a relationship. I can suffer symptoms of a cold in isolation, or break my ankle on my own. I cannot oppose anyone or be angry or irritable with anyone unless that “anyone” is in some relationship with me. “If you don’t believe me,” I sometimes tell audiences of therapists, parents, teachers, or medical professionals, “just lock yourself in your room tonight, make sure you are