Oppositional Defiant Disorder has to be the cruellest label, stigmatization of all. Allegedly caused by “inconsistent Parenting” routinely misinterpreted to mean “different parenting styles” children who are bored in school, whose coping mechanisms, eg. zoning out, messing in class, who are unable and or unwilling to learn unchallenging material, who question, who are more advanced than their peer age group are routinely labelled as O.D.D.
My 12 year old son was “diagnosed” by a psychologist engaged by the Primary School, with my consent (he was advanced, accelerated development and bored in school) so I agreed to an educational assessment. Such assessment was carried out one day over a couple of hours or so. I had a chat with Psychologist as did the Class Teacher and the School Principal (an unscrupulous man with a grudge against the family). Both I and the school filled in Checklists (I understood that the Class Teacher would be filling in the Checklist – but it appears that it may have been the Principal )- Psychologist wont discuss anything with me saying that she was only paid by the school to carry out an assessment. Request for documents under Data Protection Legislation proved fruitless as I am not the Data Subject – my son is and he knows nothing about the diagnosis, which was used by the unscrupulous Principal to stigmatise and ostracise him (told parents, as “duty of care” to discourage their children from associating with him.
The Psychologist’s report included statements from the Class Teacher to the effect that my son often sits in class doing nothing and that he sometimes gets side tracked into messing. This Class Teacher that same year gave a school report stating that my son was “outgoing, down to earth, very helpful to teacher and was not learning to his full ability”. The Psychologists findings were that my son had “exceptional intelligence, exceptional academic ability and was seriously underachieving”. She included a Rating Scales Table in her Report, which listed about 6 or 7 groups of unrelated behaviours with a cumulative score – three groups got in the high to very high range resulting in a diagnosis of “severe emotional and behavioural problems”, “severe O.D.D.” Two versions of the Report were issued – one for the parents – this didn’t include the word “severe” and the other which did was issued to three third parties including the School.
My son was prescribed Resource Hours which at the time I was given to believe were for educational purposes as the feed back to me was solely on educational matters, stating that my son had exceptional intelligence but that some of his scores were very low – possibly due to reluctance to engage – but the Psychologist was concerned particularly in light of low spatial results (checks three years later by an actual specialist educational Psychologist for educational blocks – revealed none).
My son had no reported behaviour issues in school which would suggest ODD and a Connors Questionnaire filled in by the School (age 8 – 9, the appropriate age for assessment revealed very good behaviour). The examining Psychologist based her diagnoses on the Checklists from which a graph was drawn; the graph highlighted conditions listed in the high rating scores; these conditions then transferred onto a Checklist. The Checklist as the name implies leads to a list of conditions highlighted in the Rating Scales which require checking. So a high score in zoning out in class will tick conditions such as “thought disorder” “inability to focus”. “concentration problems” “day dreaming” “anxiety” in the same way as frequent severe headaches will highlight conditions such as “Brain Tumour”, “Migrane”, “Clot”,” Brain Aneurysm” This doesn’t mean the patient has all these conditions (might only be stressed) – rather that the patient needs to be checked under these categories.
My son was assigned all the categories highlighted in Rating Scales as though he had them and convicted with a heinous crime / disorder and given a life sentence / death sentence if he ever finds out.
A Concerned Parent