The Myth of Normal 197

absolutely alone, and oppose somebody. If you succeed, put it on YouTube— it’ll go viral in no time.” Given that a child develops in the context of relationships, her behavior will be intelligible to us only if we look at the relational environment. Seen this way, these so-called ODD kids turn out to be ones who lack sufficient connection with nurturing adults and have a natural resistance to being controlled by people they do not fully trust or feel close enough to. This aversion, furthermore, is only magnified by all attempts to shame or cajole it into submission. To call this “disordered” says nothing about the child’s inner experience; it reflects only the perspective of the ones who find his recalcitrance inconvenient. It is also completely obtuse about how emotional power dynamics work: there is nothing disordered in resisting authority figures that, for whatever reason, we do not feel confident in and safe with. If we are today seeing more youngsters in automatic resistance mode, the question we must return to is, How does this culture disrupt healthy adultchild relationships? Why are we diagnosing children with a disorder, instead of “diagnosing”—and treating—their families, communities, schools, and society? The psychiatrist, author, and leading trauma researcher Bruce Perry[*] has come to disdain diagnoses almost completely. This is no knee-jerk prejudice: his dim view of the norms and practices of his field follows decades spent assessing tens of thousands of troubled children, and extensive contributions to the vast literature on adversity and what we define as “disorders.” “When I got into psychiatry,” Dr. Perry told me, “it became clear really quickly that the diagnoses were not connected to the physiology, that they were just descriptive, and that there were hundreds of physiological routes to somebody having an attention problem, for example. And yet the profession acted as if these descriptive labels were really a thing . . . I knew that if we were doing ‘research,’ if we were using these hollow descriptors which we call ‘diagnoses’ and then study interventions and outcomes, we would just get garbage. And that’s what we’ve done.” These days Dr. Perry is adamant that “even playing the DSM game is completely wrong.” When invited to contribute to one of the manual’s