Yesterday, I heard Bernard Henri Levy on Start the Week, one of my favourite podcasts, pontificating about all that is wrong with the world. I've heard him speak once before on a very specific issue (a murder) and don't remember much of what he said; I was certainly not astounded by his fatuousness as in this latest instance. The point where I switched off was when he equated modern, medicalised societies, which tend to eradicate the notion of "evil" in favour of a range of treatable pathologies, as "totalitarian" -- doctors controlling us all with little pills.
I had an epiphany of sorts about the burden that this kind of thinking contributes to my own very personal circumstances. I suppose because to some degree I would be one of Levy's natural constituents, a leftie-type who values intellectual critique, almost reflexively suspicious of much that modern western capitalism "offers", always on the lookout for a bigger picture or a deeper issue. I transpose his observation a little here from pills (although I could easily get worked up about that -- another blog topic perhaps) to the difficult distinction between personality and disorder -- the medicalisation of personality, I suppose. Having a child diagnosed at 2 with a pervasive developmental disorder, I've had plenty of experience with this one. I've now realised that I need to become more articulate about why I can accept his diagnosis, his "label" as helpful and don't see it as reductive, as some kind of denial of his humanity. Again, the topic for another blog.
To wander away from my incredulousness at Levy's simplistic thinking, this question of whether or not to "label" one's child has been more burdensome with S. This blog was basically born from this struggle, which often seems to boil down to: am I inadequate as a parent, or is there actually something unusual about this child? It has been a terrible uncertainty to live with. Only a few weeks ago, the psychologist once again made it known that she considers him to have ASD traits. Whereas with P, being told this gave me a map to work with; with S, I feel the most gut-wrenching, paralysing confusion, because it just doesn't seem to fit, but I have no better explanation.
A few days ago S had a friend for a sleepover, a lovely, compliant, cheerful little boy who is simply not interested in conflict or trouble for trouble's sake. It had a positive effect on my 2, whose behaviour improved a lot while he was here. About an hour after he left, without any conscious thought process on my part, I found myself impulsively typing "opposition defiant disorder" into Google. The contrast between the 2 boys was so striking that the term just welled up into relevance. I've mentioned that Q and I joke that whatever the diagnostic specifics of this term, it always sounded right to us, but we've never been encouraged by any professionals to see S as fitting with this profile. But he does, he does, he does. I've gone to site after site and he is so much the child they describe. And I felt that same sense of being presented with a map; all the distressing crap that goes on in the day now has a name and even though we were pretty much doing what they recommend, we have greater understanding of why we are doing it, and so it gets easier to handle the disruptions, feeling now as if we are really on a path to changing his behaviour for the better.
So it could be that I've become a victim of Levy's totalitarian, medicalised society, that I can't function without a bunch of artificial distinctions about individual difference to tell me how I should behave. But I also know that there is a huge qualitative difference between my settling upon these labels for my boys. ASD is fundamental to a person's experience of the world; ODD is more or less a secondary condition that arises from other difficulties, usually ADHD I've discovered, but that I'm happy to say is clearly not in play here. I could beat myself up well & truly over one of the other cited causes -- authoritarian parenting -- but I really do know now that that is simplistic as well. I can certainly accept that we have fallen into bad patterns where stressed parents have reinforced these tendencies; that is the whole reason I went looking for help, knowing that I was losing the battle to have a supportive, nurturing relationship with my child. We have more to discover, but this weekend, having both read through the most concise descriptions of ODD and its management, Q and I have experienced a calmness and a conviction that has been nothing but good for us, and will be nothing but good for our children.
