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Why Anti-Authoritarians Are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill (2012)

382 points by kushti 11y ago

nickbauman 11y ago
I have a friend whose 14-year-old daughter has been diagnosed with ODD. She frequently cuts herself with anything she can get her hands on and when she doesn't get her way she will literally spin around and around shouting and growling angrily for a quarter to a half hour like she's possessed, sometimes physically lashing out at her parents. It's terrifying to watch and is definitely not your garden variety skepticism of authority.
- dkersten 11y ago
  A implying B doesn't mean that B implies A. That is, anti-authoritarians being diagnosed as mentally ill does not mean that mentally ill people are automatically anti-authoritarians.
- tajen 11y ago
  You seem to believe that she is ill, but the only reason you provide is that she wants to take her life away. Proof. Why did we invent that it's forbidden to take your life away? It's in all insurance contracts, in bank agreements, in many ToS; If a kid takes their life away then the parents are penaly responsible for not looking after; and if an elderly person becomes sick, then she's forever prevented from accessing the basic tools to end her life. For god's sake, and elderly person who lived 100 years, let her die when she thinks it's time to, even if it's messy. As much as solitary confinement is a form of torture - as much as prison, actually (once again, we'll keep you forcefully alive while in prison, because you must endure the torture we've assigned to you), keeping people alive when they want to die is another form of torture. So I'm very sorry but that 14-year-old girl might being tortured by the requirement of staying alive.
  - Thriptic 11y ago
    I don't see any mention in the parent post about suicidal ideation. Self-harm != desire to kill yourself. Also lumping together wanting to kill yourself because you are experiencing severe physical pain (old people with terminal illness), psychological pain through torture (certain prison confinements), and mental disorders is a gross over simplification. This isn't a binary issue. We shouldn't say people are never allowed to commit suicide or people are always allowed to commit suicide without us trying to intervene to improve their quality of life.
vanderZwan 11y ago
Telling how the people in the comments who disagree with the article also tend to appeal to authority (see the comments by Herb and Jaroon).
pigpaws 11y ago
really? I thought they were called "Libertarians".
jensen123 11y ago
I think it's interesting to look at how psychiatric disorders are invented. For example, is homosexuality a mental disorder? It's basically just a bunch of psychiatrists getting together, suggesting stuff and voting on it. It is not science. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-real-problems-with-psychiatry/275371/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-real-p...
- deleted 11y ago
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- x5n1 11y ago
  To be functional in an inherently dysfunctional system that is the nature of hierarchical society. It is made for certain personalities to thrive at the cost of others who may or may not be economically as important, but then why should personality and behavior be judged by the economic and social ability of an individual, but that's what psychology is really for... for enforcing, disciplining and punishing people that don't conform to the economic or social norms, who are therefore not functional in conventional settings. Who are hunter gatherers by their nature and not corporate drones, for instance.
  - tossaway1 11y ago
    Even hunter gatherer societies had social structure and norms. And in those societies people far outside the norm were probably treated much worse than they are in today's society.
    - x5n1 11y ago
      Nothing as it is today. If you could hunt or gather you had a place. And you were related to everyone in your tribe by blood. So it is a similar relationship to the one that you have with your family or extended family. So yes to an extent you are right, but at the same time the social cohesion was much greater. In modern society if you are out you are out, you have no recourse at all. Hunter gatherer societies probably not as much. But I am sure if you did certain things in some of those groups that were out of the social norm they would kill you. But lots of things that you would get in trouble for today would not raise a brow in their societies. There are lots of trivial things that you can get in trouble for in mass societies that are of no concern to someone living in a tribal setting today for instance.
meric 11y ago
The definition of "Authority": the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. We're all free-willed individuals. Accepting orders, accepting other's decisions, and obeying others are voluntary actions. As soon as we refuse to follow an order, refuse to obey, the "authority", by definition, returns its power back to ourselves. Authorities are only authorities because by our grace, we allow them to be authorities. The crazy ones are those who would voluntary give up their own initiative to the stupid, to the power obsessed, to the egocentric, to the selfish.
- x5n1 11y ago
  And yet this giving up is the quintessential behavior of humans which makes mass society possible. If we did not cede power and allow ourselves to be made into essentially slaves to serve each other's desires, society and the economy would not be possible. Yet I often feel that this was in fact a deal with the devil which has already reduced people to machines to be coerced at the whim of others and in the future will do more of that and continue to make life less autonomous, stable and pleasurable because of the continued decreased autonomy to be yourself and say what you want to say when you want to say it, and not be judged and discriminated against for having your own non-mainstream opinions.
  - meric 11y ago
    I am more optimistic - the various revolts and revolutions, numerous events in the past of destruction of the aristocratic classes, the modern phenomenon of electing party insurgents (Trump, Sanders) shows people giving up power is, in the long run, a free choice. Authority must be at least somewhat benevolent to continue to be.
    - Aeolos 11y ago
      In what universe is electing Trump or Sanders a way to reclaim power?
      - oldmanjay 11y ago
TheLogothete 11y ago
Many people are so desperate to convince themselves that they are very special snowflakes that they will use every opportunity to renounce the status quo. It doesn't matter if the status quo is very sensible and sound. They need, crave to be unique. So every crazy, poorly concocted conspiracy theory gets thousands, millions of devout followers. Convinced beyond belief in the most absurd of things. The funniest thing is that they all think everybody else is delusional and they got to the very special, elevated place, reserved only for the very enlightened. It is very annoying, tbh.
- vixen99 11y ago
  No evidence - merely a rant.
  - TheLogothete 11y ago
    You are absolutely right. This is my opinion, not a rebuttal. I don't need to collect formal evidence to leave my comment. This is the Internet, not an academic panel.
    - roflc0ptic 11y ago
      This is not an academic panel, this is hacker news! I think on average the culture here tries to avoid wholly opinion based discussion. You don't need to collect formal evidence to leave your comment, but substantiated claims sure will be more popular than unsubstantiated ones.
    - cat-dev-null 11y ago
      Experience is evidence. Foot-stomping demands of evidence for things that are obvious from those without experience is tiring. It's like those kids whom start working at cafés as their first job, do everything by the book and are embarrassingly uncool.
- fallingfrog 11y ago
  "Different" does not mean "better" and "equal" does not mean "the same". I don't believe that I am any better than anyone else, but I am unique. Find me another identical copy of me and you can prove me wrong. And then you can go ahead and force me to conform to whatever it is you think is sensible and sound.
mbrutsch 11y ago
When you have a "diagnosis" from a "scientific discipline" that cannot be rigorously tested or diagnosed, it seems obvious it would be open to abuse in this manner. If there were a blood test for crazy, it would be a little more difficult. Sadly, diagnosing illnesses of the mind is just educated guesswork, and will likely never rise to the level of science that most people assume.
- thaw13579 11y ago
  There is evidence that MRI can be used to detect biological differences and that there is some genetic component as well. The two major challenges though are that these diseases are not "binary" but multivariate and that it's very difficult to collect enough data to explore that space. So it's certainly hard, but not impossible! http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920996401001633 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920996401... http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v43/n10/full/ng.940.html http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v43/n10/full/ng.940.html
Santosh83 11y ago
Any deviant act or view is probably anti-authoritarian if by authoritarian you also include the "authority" with which mainstream views and regulations are imposed, sometimes by law, more often by majority pressure. Yet everything mainstream isn't somehow bad. Humans survive only by cooperating and banding together. It's just that we need to strike a golden mean between listening to authority and being unique. It's a matter of intelligence, applied on a case-by-case basis, and will work only if the most people in a group practice it.
- smokeyj 11y ago
  > Humans survive only by cooperating and banding together. Or, more realistically - by enslavement, the threat of violence and killing off everyone who challenges your authority. It seems history is tirelessly cyclical.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
In the Soviet Union, and I imagine the other Marxist–Leninist countries, people were sometimes diagnosed as mentally ill for not believing in socialism.
- goodcanadian 11y ago
  I get your point, but I do somewhat wonder about the sanity of people in the Soviet Union who would not, at least, pretend to believe in socialism.
  - bitchypat 11y ago
    >Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.
  - stplsd 11y ago
    Dissidents and human right activists were sent for mental institution mostly by diagnosing schizophrenia as a means to discredit them and as message to others. We should applaud those brave souls and not doubt their sanity.
joeax 11y ago
People that have an unrelenting, almost worship-like devotion to authority scare the bejesus out of me. Imagine what a great society we would be if we were all free thinkers.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  And nowhere is this more obvious than, Silicon Valley. Where the famous names are worshipped. Repeated as talismans in posts and blogs. Dropped in conversation at every turn. Studied and written about and hailed. Discussed in hushed tones at lunch. Baffles me.
  - darkclarity 11y ago
    With a lack of religion, people naturally seek idols to look up to and create a focus in their lives. That said, it can go too far and look like a cult. The more I read about behaviour, history and psychology, the more I realise just how specialised religions were at keeping civilisations sane.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  >Imagine what a great society we would be if we were all free thinkers. It's tough to herd cats.
  - ersii 11y ago
    Serious thought: Why do you have to or why would you try to herd (free thinking) cats?
fallingfrog 11y ago
This comment below the article triggered something deep inside me: "So a 7 year old who refuses to read or practice reading is healthy anti-authority individual?". Let me tell you that when I was a kid I loved to read, I read voraciously everything I could find, and I did because nobody made me do it. I can assure you that if a teacher had sat me down and forced me to read something boring at that young age, I would have hated the teacher, hated reading, and hated school and I would hated anyone who tried to get me to do it again, forever. Believe me, some kids just love freedom! Please, if there are any teachers out here reading this, do not kill the fragile thing in your kids that loves to learn by forcing them to read or do something boring with no explanation except, do it because you said so!
- coroutines 11y ago
  You definitely have a point. I imagine there is no good, scientific method to determining how someone should be motivated that we can train teachers with. Just have to trust they're human enough to see our inspirations before they apply their method. We can't all be amazing psychiatrists, and adults have a lot of influence on us at that age. I too benefited from a stand-offish approach to learning. I wish the better teachers were paid more to be in our schools - I had a teacher that completely ruined my love for animation. Largely I think schools exhaust kids to get them to change/conform.
  - Alex3917 11y ago
    > I imagine there is no good, scientific method to determining how someone should be motivated that we can train teachers with. http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458915029&sr=8-1&keywords=no+contest+the+case+against+competition http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp... http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458915006&sr=8-1&keywords=punished+by+rewards http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Pra...
  - stray 11y ago
    The Montessori method pretty much nails it.
Joof 11y ago
My (former) psychiatrist labeled me noncompliant for requesting modern studies on SSRIs not done by the selling company before taking them. I guess I fall in that category.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Medical professionals don't seem to like it much when patients do anything that might call their expertise into question, it seems. :/
  - Gravityloss 11y ago
    If you advised a friend on cryptography/databases and they started pushing back and repeating some questionable cliches? There's two sides to this. I've heard it's quite frustrating to be a teacher or doctor nowadays...
    - machinelearning 11y ago
      There is a huge asymmetry in the consequences of not pushing back. While the expert might be frequently frustrated by having to explain away the same cliches, the patient/customer has a lot to lose by not pushing back. Especially when the topic in question is a person's health.
    - Joof 11y ago
      On the flip side, how many programmers still make mistakes in cryptography and databases when they are knowledgeable about them? Could any single programmer write a cryptographically secure 'anything' even as an expert in their field? Now imagine the program they are writing is someone else's life and they are an expert, but the tools they use are unstable, have frequent revisions and don't notify you when something changes and have tons of undefined behavior. Testing also likes to return more or less random values and you can only kind of tell what the outcome has been.
- ci5er 11y ago
  Non-compliant or resistant? The former means "you don't do what I tell you to do" and the latter means "my attempts to fix you aren't working, but it isn't my fault". I hear a lot more of the latter in the literature. In fact, I don't think I recall ever hearing the former...
Mikeb85 11y ago
On one hand, devotion to authority is kind of what makes society possible. We all work, are cogs in the machine, and as a reward we all get a more or less decent existence. Of course, the downside is that when society is ill, or when our leaders are objectively wrong, we don't see it because we're used to just following authority, and can't see beyond our couches and screens.
- donatj 11y ago
  I have to believe we as creatures can work together willingly. Consensus and order can be brought by understanding and communication without without force of authority.
  - Mikeb85 11y ago
    It's not about the force of authority, but the willingness to defer authority to prevent having to be responsible for the consequences of our own decisions. If we go with popular consensus, we absolve ourselves of the guilt if anything goes wrong. "Going with the crowd" is a survival instinct. This isn't controversial. It's observable with both humans, and in the natural world (flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of whatever, etc...).
  - Aeolos 11y ago
    There are people who derive pleasure from destroying things. On the internet you may call them trolls (from the harmless garden variety, to the people swatting, making death/rape threats) - depending on the variant, you may eject them from the community, shadowban them, call the police, etc. All of which are applications of force and authority. How do you deal with those people, when you go outside the safe confines of the internet, without using force or authority?
jkot 11y ago
I read a bit on authors pages. I think he paints "anti-authoritarian" as young hippie who is against everything just because. That explains no mentions of psychiatry in soviet union, early 20th century and so on.
cat-dev-null 11y ago
Police have been known to send people whom they have beaten up for mental examination in order to discredit them. This happened in Los Altos to a guy playing Ingress.
alanwatts 11y ago
Reminds me of a Dr. King quote: >But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? "Crazy", "Nutjob", "Mentally Ill", "Extremist", "Heretic" - these are words used to write off ideas which are too difficult for one to even consider because they often threaten the most deeply held assumptions of a persons life. Social constructions can be very fragile.
humbleMouse 11y ago
This is very interesting to me. I went to a psychiatrist last week and she told me I have "delusional thoughts about the government." She asked me what gives me anxiety, and I told her that it freaks me out that the government collects all of our data and wants to take away encryption. She told me I am nuts and that the government doesn't do that. ce le vie!
- ajmurmann 11y ago
  This is the creepiest story I have heard in a while. I wouldn't be surprised if many psychiatrist would diagnose the average HN reader this way. Also makes me think of Terminator 2.
  - hodwik 11y ago
    I think you overestimate how many of us agree with you.
    - williamcotton 11y ago
      It seems like many people on this forum would be considered by many psychiatric professionals to be suffering from delusions about the government, but perhaps there is a silent majority of HackerNews readers who are not as overtly paranoid about government surveillance. I doubt the actual levels of paranoia as well. These are Internet comment boards. There's a lot of huffing and puffing and general stage theatrics.
      - jkyle 11y ago
        > It seems like many people on this forum would be considered by many psychiatric professionals to be suffering from delusions about the government, The way the OP framed the therapist's response, sure. Of course, they're telling their perspective on what the therapist responded. Having worked with therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and studied it to some degree in my early college including internships the more typical concern of a therapist is not the veracity of your beliefs (they're largely irrelevant), but the degree to which they are causing distress and if that distress is to a level that it interferes with your ability to function in society and form meaningful relationships With 'meaningful' defined by your personal satisfaction with the relationships and the satisfaction of those you have relationships with. This is the criteria for all behaviors in the DSM that causes a spectrum of behaviors or beliefs to shift on the continuum of 'normal' to 'abnormal' for the purpose of diagnosis. In practice, that means they could care less if you think the government (or God, or FSM, or Xenu) is watching your every move...but only if that keeps you from leaving your house or causes you significant distress. Or kept you from forming relationships because you thought they were government agents. For example, here is the definition of delusion from the DSM V Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture* (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.* Emphasis mine. The point is by virtue of most people in the subculture of hackers believe this way means that, by definition, it is not delusional. But again, if it keeps you from getting to the grocery store it would likely be worth considering medication. ;)
tsunamifury 11y ago
I think once you realize the vast majority of authorities preach contribution and submission while merely taking for themselves -- you begin to see everyone around you who submits to them as a bit insane. This becomes really hard to rectify until you can figure out an equilibrium of physical submission to a unjust authority without psychological submission.
dschiptsov 11y ago
Authority of a math textbook or a biology textbook is not the same as authority of religious dogmatism, tradition or a state ideology. Rejecting the former is an illness, rejecting the later is a right.
randcraw 11y ago
'Anti-authority' is not a well defined label. Independent thought and independent behavior are very different things. And unless your behavior is disruptive or destructive, generally nobody cares what you think. Iconoclasm is a more specific label: independence of thought, or belief, or convention, without any mention of behavior. Presumably iconoclasts are what Levine is describing as positive examples of anti-authority, AKA mentally healthy folks who just think differently, but don't act on it, or who act on it in constructive ways. But anyone who acts disruptively or destructively also qualifies as anti-authority. So I don't see where Levine draws the line between good and bad forms of anti-authority. Inactive belief is good? Disruptive or violent is bad? He doesn't say.
- StanislavPetrov 11y ago
  Who decides what is "disruptive"? Is it "bad" to disrupt society if that society is evil and corrupt? Was a German who sought to disrupt the Nazis in Germany mentally ill, or was he rightfully disruptive and anti-authoritarian? The point here is that authority and society have no intrinsic worth. The issue is that those who reject authority and/or society are defined as mentally ill according to the psuedo-science of psychiatry, whether or not that authority and/or society is worthy of rejection.
  - randcraw 11y ago
    That sounds like a resounding endorsement for anarchy. :-) Game theorists will certainly disagree with you that there's no value in group cooperation. It's pretty obvious that any group that cooperates is more powerful toward almost any goal than any individual or group that does not cooperate. But the question implied by Levine isn't whether cooperation is "worth" more than uncooperation. He's asking whether authority is always good, and hence, whether anti-authority is necessarily bad, or whether it's often a constructive alternative to group-think and submission, given that everyone is inevitably part of one or more groups and thus is obliged to choose a path: conform, change the rules, or quit the group. Levine's implication is that those who choose not to play by the rules, and disrupt the group destructively, are not necessarily pathological. But I think Levine didn't succeed in making that case. He claimed only that some people are labeled as malefactors strictly because they refuse to conform to norms or authority. He doesn't say what fraction of those cases did so unhelpfully. In fact, I suspect all were disruptive to the group's normal conduct, and most in a destructive way. That's not exactly a strong case for singing out, "Viva la difference!"
Yaa101 11y ago
19th century schooling (which is still our current schooling system) is about preparing for conscription.
openasocket 11y ago
OK, my father deals with people with ODD and Conduct disorder on a regular basis, and I think this article is really miss-characterizing the condition. You don't have ODD if you have a reason for defying authority, even a bad reason. ODD is defined as having problems with planning and inhibition. I was actually talking with my father just last night about ODD, and he described an experiment to me. Imagine you have a patient play a card game in which they have the chance to win money or lose money. Initially, the game is rigged in the patient's favor, but as the game goes on it gets harder and harder for them to win. Most people will figure out that the odds have changed and stop playing, but people with ODD or Conduct disorder will continue playing far longer than anyone else because they have poor planning skills. Describing people with ODD as simply anti-authority is really missing the crux of the condition. EDIT: I shouldn't criticize the article, but rather the people who are doing the over diagnosing. Just thought I'd give some context to the condition, so people understand what ODD really is.
- vanderZwan 11y ago
  You're inverting the entire premise of the article: he isn't really talking about ADHD/ODD, he is talking about people who are anti-authoritarian and are misdiagnosed as ADHD/ODD as a result of it. When he talks about famous people who would have been diagnosed as having these disorders in modern times, he's not saying that they have these disorders, but that the diagnosis is bogus. It's as he's saying "these people who have the common cold are misdiagnosed as having the flu!" and you respond with "these common cold characteristics are nothing like the flu." Well, yes, that's part of the issue at hand.
  - openasocket 11y ago
    You're absolutely right: I guess I just wanted to provide some context on what ODD really is. I didn't want people to think that all ODD diagnoses are like this, or that ODD is not a real disease. I'll edit my comment to reflect that
- tryitnow 11y ago
  Then why call it Opposition Defiant Disorder? Why not call it Executive Planning Disorder or something else that refers to poor planning skills. I like your dad's definition better, but I fear that there are institutional and cultural factors that allow ODD diagnoses to stigmatize anti-authoritarians.
stegosaurus 11y ago
This is the primary issue I have with our treatment of mental health. Physical disabilities and illnesses come about due to clear actions, and are generally recognizable as universally bad. These sorts of things either happen near-arbitrarily (birth abnormaility, blood clot) or via an accident (falling down the stairs). After the fact, you're less able, in general. By contrast, many mental illnesses are triggered by society, and some make no sense without a societal structure. People go to work, become stressed at the lack of reward or meaning in their employment and get depressed. Now they have an 'illness', because they no longer want to turn up for work. Cyclical reasoning. There are certainly many mental illnesses that aren't covered by this, but I think that when comments are made about 'declining mental health in society' - it's really just throwing diagnoses at the fact that we're becoming more cut-throat....
- 300baud 11y ago
  Definitely. If people talked about physical illness the same way we did about mental illness, we'd diagnose anybody below than the 30th percentile in height with High Shelf Access Disorder and try giving them growth hormones. Mismatch to an artificial environment is not necessarily a disease. This Philosophy Bites episode on "Categorizing Mental Disorders" has some good material on the topic: http://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on-categorising-mental-disorders.html http://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on-categoris... And there's a lot of good work under the label "medicalization of deviance".
jokoon 11y ago
I don't think authority is the problem, what bothers me more, is how passive consensus somehow reinforces some ideas more than others, and that can make them difficult to challenge them. So in a sense, I think that there is a transparent "consented" authority, which is harder to challenge. Of course most people are happier in such a society. That's true, you can't really tell if the person is insane or just having an opinion about something.
tristor 11y ago
Having experienced some of these things in my own life, I can honestly say that I do believe that being an anti-authoritarian is often mistaken as a mental problem. I believe that authority is the wielding of power by an institution or individual, and power is only useful if you voluntarily cede control (this doesn't apply always, but does in 99% of cases). Refusal to cede control returns that power back to you. People who /believe/ that they have power over you, when proven that they don't, by your inability or denial of compliance get irrationally angry and tend to think that it makes you a terrible person. I consider this a selfish response, if perhaps a natural one. To truly live in a free society we must be okay with having power over us when the situation requires (such as at work), while also being okay with rejecting power when our morals and ethics demand it of us. The issue seems to be that some people have the ability to do the latter, and other do not, always appealing to authority to base their arguments or guide their path. The fact that many of these people who are obsessed with authority end up in mental health professions is not really surprising, since the mental health professions largely base the current accepted practices on cults of personality rather than on scientific inquiry. The fact that I chose a profession where it's basically impossible to BS to anyone who knows anything because the rules of mathematics drive things far more than how eloquently you speak is also not surprising. Anti-authoritarians love facts, facts are a good basis for deciding when to cede power and when to take it back and provide a guiding principle in your life that doesn't rely on another person being an authority over you, even if they are outside your control. Anyway, that's kind of my reaction to reading the article. Definitely interesting to reflect back on some of my life experiences given this context and consider how things could have turned out differently, both for the worse or for the better.
pmarreck 11y ago
Site repeatedly crashes on mobile, thanks to Javascript ads. And this is why I was made to disable my ad blocker by many sites. Thanks, f*ing ad industry. The least you could do is not crash my shit if I allow you in.
dbpokorny 11y ago
Does anyone else find the thought of killing people in position of authority sexually stimulating, or am I just some kind of freak?
Zigurd 11y ago
This overlooks an opportunity: We need a new disorder. Call it Control-seeking Disorder, or CSD. Cop gets in your face? Diagnose him with CSD and require treatment that lowers aggression. TSA bumming you out? Make sure they screen out CSD sufferers. Get them in treatment.
Aqueous 11y ago
"Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously." But there also some individuals who think any authority is illegitimate. I have friends and close relatives who I would characterize as having this personality trait. I also observe that it has a negative impact on their quality of life. They have trouble holding jobs, staying in school, keeping friends, and building personal romantic relationships because they are so resistant to being accountable to any other person - accountability which translates in their mind to obedience to authority. Authority isn't always illegitimate. That's why there is a such a thing as a pathological degree of anti-authoritarian sentiment.
dreamlayers 11y ago
Sanity is defined relative to society and social norms. For example, homosexuality stopped being labelled as a disorder when society's attitudes started changing.
thetruthseeker1 11y ago
I am an immigrant in America. I have had problems with my bosses(American) when I challenged some of their decisions at work. When I challenged their decision in every quantifiable metric, they could not defend it in any way and relented, but then I heard from HR about not following orders in general. I think in American culture there is lot of emphasis on command hierarchy( may be military influenced?) and who wears the pants so to speak, compared to my home country in the east, and I think that may have something to do with it. But I can attest to the the repulsiveness I feel to subtle authoritarianism where orders are sneaked in along with regular conversation.
- bcheung 11y ago
  It depends a lot on where you work. I have worked at places where I have delivered what I thought were superior results compared to what they were asking but they were upset because it wasn't exactly what they asked for. Other places give a lot more authority and a wide latitude. Startups tend to be a lot more flexible in this regard and it is why I prefer working at startups vs enterprise companies.
hyperpallium 11y ago
The majority is always sane, Louis.
eevilspock 11y ago
Prior discussions of this piece: 206 comments, 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5674438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5674438 138 comments, 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642570
xlm1717 11y ago
I thought it was particularly interesting when the author talked about differing reactions people had when taking psychiatric medication. It then seems that the effect of psychiatric medication has more to do with the person's frame of mind than any actual effect of the medication. According to the author, if the patient rejects the doctor's authority, the patient can react even more violently when put on psychiatric medication. Even more interestingly, the author goes on to suggest that patients who do take the medication take it to placate authority, rather than for perceived effect. The author uses the example of someone in a highly stressful job taking Xanax instead of marijuana because while they might believe marijuana helps more, they don't take it due to employer drug tests. It leads me to this question: when doctors think a medication is working, do they think so because of actual beneficial effects seen in the patient, or simply because the patient is complying with the treatment?
bcheung 11y ago
Anti-Authoritarian sounds a lot like critical thinking. That's a disease now? "Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not."
- alanwatts 11y ago
  Critical thinking is heresy to group think.
useYourIllusion 11y ago
I find it quite alarming that the DSM has been wielded as a tool for hospitalizations and forced medication despite providing sparse forensic evidence of the diseases it attempts to diagnose.
Sideloader 11y ago
I have a friend who I've known since first grade. He would never just "obey orders"...he would always try to find out why he was being asked to do something and if the request seemed illegitimate he would refuse, sometimes in creative ways, to honor it. He was diagnosed with ADHD and labeled a "problem child". As we grew older and his ethics and moral compass developed he would supply arguments to back up his actions - he would not rebel for rebellion's sake but because he truly believed his actions were reasonable and justified. In high school these took the form of successfully defying the school's no-hats-allowed policy and under the auspices of a Frank Zappa loving art teacher forming The Anarchist's Club (the tongue-in-cheek logo was a medieval spiked club weapon emblazoned with a circle-A symbol). The Anarchist's Club biggest action was a boycott of a mandatory pep rally for the school's basketball team (we offered to study in the library instead) which earned its 13 or so members a suspension with readmission after a written apology and meeting with our parents. After three days only me, my friend and one other student remained defiant. (Our parents were supportive of our "cause".) We were readmitted after my friend and I went to the town's newspaper and told them our story and a subsequent meeting with the school board which, to our surprise, agreed the offer to study in lieu of attending the rally was reasonable and overruled the principal's authority. After high school we both moved to the west coast to attend college and drifted apart. In the "real world", despite much rhetorical talk of freedom and liberty from all corners, obedience and conformity to an often rigid status quo are expected if one wants to be accepted by, and benefit from, mainstream society. There are exceptions, like entrepreneurship to some extent, and limited room to negotiate but generally defying the authority of supervisors, managers, professors, the law of the land and any number of "superior" people and institutions is met with the crack of a whip rather than an offer of dialog and compromise. Most of us suppress our anti-authoritarian instincts and fall in line with the established order. The more we have to lose, the more we opt for security and predictability over principles and conscience. My friend says he cannot do this. Talking a decade after high school he says he was born without the "conformity gene" and that he can't will himself to do something he feels is unjust or infringes unreasonably on his liberty. He can't, for example, obey a micro-managing boss if his method of working is more productive than the bosses way. If the boss is truly concerned about productivity and the company's bottom line he or she will not force employees to do things one way and one way only. Every person has methods that work for them, but may not work for others, and a boss who does not respect this is, according to my friend, an ego-tripping asshole or a mindless drone in thrall to "management theory". My friend argues that his anti-authoritarian nature has cost him many jobs and opportunities and has made climbing the middle-class career ladder all but impossible. He makes money by buying and selling things on Craigslist and E-bay, freelance graphic design jobs and the marijuana reselling industry. He claims to have no interest in a stable career, home ownership and a family. More than that, he says his disposition makes it impossible for him to submit to arbitrary authority and to shelve his reservations for the sake of a career. If I had just met him I might be tempted to call bullshit and think he's rationalizing his failure after the fact but I've known this guy almost my entire life and his behavior has been consistent since first grade. He has been diagnosed with adult ADHD, an anxiety disorder, depression and other mood disorders. (The DSM even provides a handy "unspecified disorder" category.) One anecdotal tale proves nothing and there is a possible chicken/egg problem here but based on my friend's and, to a lesser extent, my own and other people's experiences I am convinced there are good reasons for the APA or similar group to do an in-depth, independent study investigating the links between mental illness diagnoses and anti-authoritarian personality traits. Given what is at stake, I doubt that will happen any time soon.

382 points by kushti 11y ago

I have a friend whose 14-year-old daughter has been diagnosed with ODD. She frequently cuts herself with anything she can get her hands on and when she doesn't get her way she will literally spin around and around shouting and growling angrily for a quarter to a half hour like she's possessed, sometimes physically lashing out at her parents. It's terrifying to watch and is definitely not your garden variety skepticism of authority.

dkersten 11y ago
A implying B doesn't mean that B implies A. That is, anti-authoritarians being diagnosed as mentally ill does not mean that mentally ill people are automatically anti-authoritarians.
tajen 11y ago
You seem to believe that she is ill, but the only reason you provide is that she wants to take her life away. Proof. Why did we invent that it's forbidden to take your life away? It's in all insurance contracts, in bank agreements, in many ToS; If a kid takes their life away then the parents are penaly responsible for not looking after; and if an elderly person becomes sick, then she's forever prevented from accessing the basic tools to end her life. For god's sake, and elderly person who lived 100 years, let her die when she thinks it's time to, even if it's messy. As much as solitary confinement is a form of torture - as much as prison, actually (once again, we'll keep you forcefully alive while in prison, because you must endure the torture we've assigned to you), keeping people alive when they want to die is another form of torture. So I'm very sorry but that 14-year-old girl might being tortured by the requirement of staying alive.
- Thriptic 11y ago
  I don't see any mention in the parent post about suicidal ideation. Self-harm != desire to kill yourself. Also lumping together wanting to kill yourself because you are experiencing severe physical pain (old people with terminal illness), psychological pain through torture (certain prison confinements), and mental disorders is a gross over simplification. This isn't a binary issue. We shouldn't say people are never allowed to commit suicide or people are always allowed to commit suicide without us trying to intervene to improve their quality of life.

vanderZwan 11y ago

Telling how the people in the comments who disagree with the article also tend to appeal to authority (see the comments by Herb and Jaroon).

pigpaws 11y ago

really? I thought they were called "Libertarians".

jensen123 11y ago

I think it's interesting to look at how psychiatric disorders are invented. For example, is homosexuality a mental disorder? It's basically just a bunch of psychiatrists getting together, suggesting stuff and voting on it. It is not science. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-real-problems-with-psychiatry/275371/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the-real-p...

deleted 11y ago
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x5n1 11y ago
To be functional in an inherently dysfunctional system that is the nature of hierarchical society. It is made for certain personalities to thrive at the cost of others who may or may not be economically as important, but then why should personality and behavior be judged by the economic and social ability of an individual, but that's what psychology is really for... for enforcing, disciplining and punishing people that don't conform to the economic or social norms, who are therefore not functional in conventional settings. Who are hunter gatherers by their nature and not corporate drones, for instance.
- tossaway1 11y ago
  Even hunter gatherer societies had social structure and norms. And in those societies people far outside the norm were probably treated much worse than they are in today's society.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    Nothing as it is today. If you could hunt or gather you had a place. And you were related to everyone in your tribe by blood. So it is a similar relationship to the one that you have with your family or extended family. So yes to an extent you are right, but at the same time the social cohesion was much greater. In modern society if you are out you are out, you have no recourse at all. Hunter gatherer societies probably not as much. But I am sure if you did certain things in some of those groups that were out of the social norm they would kill you. But lots of things that you would get in trouble for today would not raise a brow in their societies. There are lots of trivial things that you can get in trouble for in mass societies that are of no concern to someone living in a tribal setting today for instance.

meric 11y ago

The definition of "Authority": the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. We're all free-willed individuals. Accepting orders, accepting other's decisions, and obeying others are voluntary actions. As soon as we refuse to follow an order, refuse to obey, the "authority", by definition, returns its power back to ourselves. Authorities are only authorities because by our grace, we allow them to be authorities. The crazy ones are those who would voluntary give up their own initiative to the stupid, to the power obsessed, to the egocentric, to the selfish.

x5n1 11y ago
And yet this giving up is the quintessential behavior of humans which makes mass society possible. If we did not cede power and allow ourselves to be made into essentially slaves to serve each other's desires, society and the economy would not be possible. Yet I often feel that this was in fact a deal with the devil which has already reduced people to machines to be coerced at the whim of others and in the future will do more of that and continue to make life less autonomous, stable and pleasurable because of the continued decreased autonomy to be yourself and say what you want to say when you want to say it, and not be judged and discriminated against for having your own non-mainstream opinions.
- meric 11y ago
  I am more optimistic - the various revolts and revolutions, numerous events in the past of destruction of the aristocratic classes, the modern phenomenon of electing party insurgents (Trump, Sanders) shows people giving up power is, in the long run, a free choice. Authority must be at least somewhat benevolent to continue to be.
  - Aeolos 11y ago
    In what universe is electing Trump or Sanders a way to reclaim power?
    - oldmanjay 11y ago

TheLogothete 11y ago

Many people are so desperate to convince themselves that they are very special snowflakes that they will use every opportunity to renounce the status quo. It doesn't matter if the status quo is very sensible and sound. They need, crave to be unique. So every crazy, poorly concocted conspiracy theory gets thousands, millions of devout followers. Convinced beyond belief in the most absurd of things. The funniest thing is that they all think everybody else is delusional and they got to the very special, elevated place, reserved only for the very enlightened. It is very annoying, tbh.

vixen99 11y ago
No evidence - merely a rant.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  You are absolutely right. This is my opinion, not a rebuttal. I don't need to collect formal evidence to leave my comment. This is the Internet, not an academic panel.
  - roflc0ptic 11y ago
    This is not an academic panel, this is hacker news! I think on average the culture here tries to avoid wholly opinion based discussion. You don't need to collect formal evidence to leave your comment, but substantiated claims sure will be more popular than unsubstantiated ones.
  - cat-dev-null 11y ago
    Experience is evidence. Foot-stomping demands of evidence for things that are obvious from those without experience is tiring. It's like those kids whom start working at cafés as their first job, do everything by the book and are embarrassingly uncool.
fallingfrog 11y ago
"Different" does not mean "better" and "equal" does not mean "the same". I don't believe that I am any better than anyone else, but I am unique. Find me another identical copy of me and you can prove me wrong. And then you can go ahead and force me to conform to whatever it is you think is sensible and sound.

mbrutsch 11y ago

When you have a "diagnosis" from a "scientific discipline" that cannot be rigorously tested or diagnosed, it seems obvious it would be open to abuse in this manner. If there were a blood test for crazy, it would be a little more difficult. Sadly, diagnosing illnesses of the mind is just educated guesswork, and will likely never rise to the level of science that most people assume.

thaw13579 11y ago
There is evidence that MRI can be used to detect biological differences and that there is some genetic component as well. The two major challenges though are that these diseases are not "binary" but multivariate and that it's very difficult to collect enough data to explore that space. So it's certainly hard, but not impossible! http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920996401001633 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920996401... http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v43/n10/full/ng.940.html http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v43/n10/full/ng.940.html

Santosh83 11y ago

Any deviant act or view is probably anti-authoritarian if by authoritarian you also include the "authority" with which mainstream views and regulations are imposed, sometimes by law, more often by majority pressure. Yet everything mainstream isn't somehow bad. Humans survive only by cooperating and banding together. It's just that we need to strike a golden mean between listening to authority and being unique. It's a matter of intelligence, applied on a case-by-case basis, and will work only if the most people in a group practice it.

smokeyj 11y ago
> Humans survive only by cooperating and banding together. Or, more realistically - by enslavement, the threat of violence and killing off everyone who challenges your authority. It seems history is tirelessly cyclical.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

In the Soviet Union, and I imagine the other Marxist–Leninist countries, people were sometimes diagnosed as mentally ill for not believing in socialism.

goodcanadian 11y ago
I get your point, but I do somewhat wonder about the sanity of people in the Soviet Union who would not, at least, pretend to believe in socialism.
- bitchypat 11y ago
  >Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.
- stplsd 11y ago
  Dissidents and human right activists were sent for mental institution mostly by diagnosing schizophrenia as a means to discredit them and as message to others. We should applaud those brave souls and not doubt their sanity.

joeax 11y ago

People that have an unrelenting, almost worship-like devotion to authority scare the bejesus out of me. Imagine what a great society we would be if we were all free thinkers.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
And nowhere is this more obvious than, Silicon Valley. Where the famous names are worshipped. Repeated as talismans in posts and blogs. Dropped in conversation at every turn. Studied and written about and hailed. Discussed in hushed tones at lunch. Baffles me.
- darkclarity 11y ago
  With a lack of religion, people naturally seek idols to look up to and create a focus in their lives. That said, it can go too far and look like a cult. The more I read about behaviour, history and psychology, the more I realise just how specialised religions were at keeping civilisations sane.
cryoshon 11y ago
>Imagine what a great society we would be if we were all free thinkers. It's tough to herd cats.
- ersii 11y ago
  Serious thought: Why do you have to or why would you try to herd (free thinking) cats?

fallingfrog 11y ago

This comment below the article triggered something deep inside me: "So a 7 year old who refuses to read or practice reading is healthy anti-authority individual?". Let me tell you that when I was a kid I loved to read, I read voraciously everything I could find, and I did because nobody made me do it. I can assure you that if a teacher had sat me down and forced me to read something boring at that young age, I would have hated the teacher, hated reading, and hated school and I would hated anyone who tried to get me to do it again, forever. Believe me, some kids just love freedom! Please, if there are any teachers out here reading this, do not kill the fragile thing in your kids that loves to learn by forcing them to read or do something boring with no explanation except, do it because you said so!

coroutines 11y ago
You definitely have a point. I imagine there is no good, scientific method to determining how someone should be motivated that we can train teachers with. Just have to trust they're human enough to see our inspirations before they apply their method. We can't all be amazing psychiatrists, and adults have a lot of influence on us at that age. I too benefited from a stand-offish approach to learning. I wish the better teachers were paid more to be in our schools - I had a teacher that completely ruined my love for animation. Largely I think schools exhaust kids to get them to change/conform.
- Alex3917 11y ago
  > I imagine there is no good, scientific method to determining how someone should be motivated that we can train teachers with. http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458915029&sr=8-1&keywords=no+contest+the+case+against+competition http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp... http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458915006&sr=8-1&keywords=punished+by+rewards http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Pra...
- stray 11y ago
  The Montessori method pretty much nails it.

Joof 11y ago

My (former) psychiatrist labeled me noncompliant for requesting modern studies on SSRIs not done by the selling company before taking them. I guess I fall in that category.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Medical professionals don't seem to like it much when patients do anything that might call their expertise into question, it seems. :/
- Gravityloss 11y ago
  If you advised a friend on cryptography/databases and they started pushing back and repeating some questionable cliches? There's two sides to this. I've heard it's quite frustrating to be a teacher or doctor nowadays...
  - machinelearning 11y ago
    There is a huge asymmetry in the consequences of not pushing back. While the expert might be frequently frustrated by having to explain away the same cliches, the patient/customer has a lot to lose by not pushing back. Especially when the topic in question is a person's health.
  - Joof 11y ago
    On the flip side, how many programmers still make mistakes in cryptography and databases when they are knowledgeable about them? Could any single programmer write a cryptographically secure 'anything' even as an expert in their field? Now imagine the program they are writing is someone else's life and they are an expert, but the tools they use are unstable, have frequent revisions and don't notify you when something changes and have tons of undefined behavior. Testing also likes to return more or less random values and you can only kind of tell what the outcome has been.
ci5er 11y ago
Non-compliant or resistant? The former means "you don't do what I tell you to do" and the latter means "my attempts to fix you aren't working, but it isn't my fault". I hear a lot more of the latter in the literature. In fact, I don't think I recall ever hearing the former...

Mikeb85 11y ago

On one hand, devotion to authority is kind of what makes society possible. We all work, are cogs in the machine, and as a reward we all get a more or less decent existence. Of course, the downside is that when society is ill, or when our leaders are objectively wrong, we don't see it because we're used to just following authority, and can't see beyond our couches and screens.

donatj 11y ago
I have to believe we as creatures can work together willingly. Consensus and order can be brought by understanding and communication without without force of authority.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  It's not about the force of authority, but the willingness to defer authority to prevent having to be responsible for the consequences of our own decisions. If we go with popular consensus, we absolve ourselves of the guilt if anything goes wrong. "Going with the crowd" is a survival instinct. This isn't controversial. It's observable with both humans, and in the natural world (flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of whatever, etc...).
- Aeolos 11y ago
  There are people who derive pleasure from destroying things. On the internet you may call them trolls (from the harmless garden variety, to the people swatting, making death/rape threats) - depending on the variant, you may eject them from the community, shadowban them, call the police, etc. All of which are applications of force and authority. How do you deal with those people, when you go outside the safe confines of the internet, without using force or authority?

jkot 11y ago

I read a bit on authors pages. I think he paints "anti-authoritarian" as young hippie who is against everything just because. That explains no mentions of psychiatry in soviet union, early 20th century and so on.

cat-dev-null 11y ago

Police have been known to send people whom they have beaten up for mental examination in order to discredit them. This happened in Los Altos to a guy playing Ingress.

alanwatts 11y ago

Reminds me of a Dr. King quote: >But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? "Crazy", "Nutjob", "Mentally Ill", "Extremist", "Heretic" - these are words used to write off ideas which are too difficult for one to even consider because they often threaten the most deeply held assumptions of a persons life. Social constructions can be very fragile.

humbleMouse 11y ago

This is very interesting to me. I went to a psychiatrist last week and she told me I have "delusional thoughts about the government." She asked me what gives me anxiety, and I told her that it freaks me out that the government collects all of our data and wants to take away encryption. She told me I am nuts and that the government doesn't do that. ce le vie!

ajmurmann 11y ago
This is the creepiest story I have heard in a while. I wouldn't be surprised if many psychiatrist would diagnose the average HN reader this way. Also makes me think of Terminator 2.
- hodwik 11y ago
  I think you overestimate how many of us agree with you.
  - williamcotton 11y ago
    It seems like many people on this forum would be considered by many psychiatric professionals to be suffering from delusions about the government, but perhaps there is a silent majority of HackerNews readers who are not as overtly paranoid about government surveillance. I doubt the actual levels of paranoia as well. These are Internet comment boards. There's a lot of huffing and puffing and general stage theatrics.
    - jkyle 11y ago
      > It seems like many people on this forum would be considered by many psychiatric professionals to be suffering from delusions about the government, The way the OP framed the therapist's response, sure. Of course, they're telling their perspective on what the therapist responded. Having worked with therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and studied it to some degree in my early college including internships the more typical concern of a therapist is not the veracity of your beliefs (they're largely irrelevant), but the degree to which they are causing distress and if that distress is to a level that it interferes with your ability to function in society and form meaningful relationships With 'meaningful' defined by your personal satisfaction with the relationships and the satisfaction of those you have relationships with. This is the criteria for all behaviors in the DSM that causes a spectrum of behaviors or beliefs to shift on the continuum of 'normal' to 'abnormal' for the purpose of diagnosis. In practice, that means they could care less if you think the government (or God, or FSM, or Xenu) is watching your every move...but only if that keeps you from leaving your house or causes you significant distress. Or kept you from forming relationships because you thought they were government agents. For example, here is the definition of delusion from the DSM V Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture* (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.* Emphasis mine. The point is by virtue of most people in the subculture of hackers believe this way means that, by definition, it is not delusional. But again, if it keeps you from getting to the grocery store it would likely be worth considering medication. ;)

tsunamifury 11y ago

I think once you realize the vast majority of authorities preach contribution and submission while merely taking for themselves -- you begin to see everyone around you who submits to them as a bit insane. This becomes really hard to rectify until you can figure out an equilibrium of physical submission to a unjust authority without psychological submission.

dschiptsov 11y ago

Authority of a math textbook or a biology textbook is not the same as authority of religious dogmatism, tradition or a state ideology. Rejecting the former is an illness, rejecting the later is a right.

randcraw 11y ago

'Anti-authority' is not a well defined label. Independent thought and independent behavior are very different things. And unless your behavior is disruptive or destructive, generally nobody cares what you think. Iconoclasm is a more specific label: independence of thought, or belief, or convention, without any mention of behavior. Presumably iconoclasts are what Levine is describing as positive examples of anti-authority, AKA mentally healthy folks who just think differently, but don't act on it, or who act on it in constructive ways. But anyone who acts disruptively or destructively also qualifies as anti-authority. So I don't see where Levine draws the line between good and bad forms of anti-authority. Inactive belief is good? Disruptive or violent is bad? He doesn't say.

StanislavPetrov 11y ago
Who decides what is "disruptive"? Is it "bad" to disrupt society if that society is evil and corrupt? Was a German who sought to disrupt the Nazis in Germany mentally ill, or was he rightfully disruptive and anti-authoritarian? The point here is that authority and society have no intrinsic worth. The issue is that those who reject authority and/or society are defined as mentally ill according to the psuedo-science of psychiatry, whether or not that authority and/or society is worthy of rejection.
- randcraw 11y ago
  That sounds like a resounding endorsement for anarchy. :-) Game theorists will certainly disagree with you that there's no value in group cooperation. It's pretty obvious that any group that cooperates is more powerful toward almost any goal than any individual or group that does not cooperate. But the question implied by Levine isn't whether cooperation is "worth" more than uncooperation. He's asking whether authority is always good, and hence, whether anti-authority is necessarily bad, or whether it's often a constructive alternative to group-think and submission, given that everyone is inevitably part of one or more groups and thus is obliged to choose a path: conform, change the rules, or quit the group. Levine's implication is that those who choose not to play by the rules, and disrupt the group destructively, are not necessarily pathological. But I think Levine didn't succeed in making that case. He claimed only that some people are labeled as malefactors strictly because they refuse to conform to norms or authority. He doesn't say what fraction of those cases did so unhelpfully. In fact, I suspect all were disruptive to the group's normal conduct, and most in a destructive way. That's not exactly a strong case for singing out, "Viva la difference!"

Yaa101 11y ago

19th century schooling (which is still our current schooling system) is about preparing for conscription.

openasocket 11y ago

OK, my father deals with people with ODD and Conduct disorder on a regular basis, and I think this article is really miss-characterizing the condition. You don't have ODD if you have a reason for defying authority, even a bad reason. ODD is defined as having problems with planning and inhibition. I was actually talking with my father just last night about ODD, and he described an experiment to me. Imagine you have a patient play a card game in which they have the chance to win money or lose money. Initially, the game is rigged in the patient's favor, but as the game goes on it gets harder and harder for them to win. Most people will figure out that the odds have changed and stop playing, but people with ODD or Conduct disorder will continue playing far longer than anyone else because they have poor planning skills. Describing people with ODD as simply anti-authority is really missing the crux of the condition. EDIT: I shouldn't criticize the article, but rather the people who are doing the over diagnosing. Just thought I'd give some context to the condition, so people understand what ODD really is.

vanderZwan 11y ago
You're inverting the entire premise of the article: he isn't really talking about ADHD/ODD, he is talking about people who are anti-authoritarian and are misdiagnosed as ADHD/ODD as a result of it. When he talks about famous people who would have been diagnosed as having these disorders in modern times, he's not saying that they have these disorders, but that the diagnosis is bogus. It's as he's saying "these people who have the common cold are misdiagnosed as having the flu!" and you respond with "these common cold characteristics are nothing like the flu." Well, yes, that's part of the issue at hand.
- openasocket 11y ago
  You're absolutely right: I guess I just wanted to provide some context on what ODD really is. I didn't want people to think that all ODD diagnoses are like this, or that ODD is not a real disease. I'll edit my comment to reflect that
tryitnow 11y ago
Then why call it Opposition Defiant Disorder? Why not call it Executive Planning Disorder or something else that refers to poor planning skills. I like your dad's definition better, but I fear that there are institutional and cultural factors that allow ODD diagnoses to stigmatize anti-authoritarians.

stegosaurus 11y ago

This is the primary issue I have with our treatment of mental health. Physical disabilities and illnesses come about due to clear actions, and are generally recognizable as universally bad. These sorts of things either happen near-arbitrarily (birth abnormaility, blood clot) or via an accident (falling down the stairs). After the fact, you're less able, in general. By contrast, many mental illnesses are triggered by society, and some make no sense without a societal structure. People go to work, become stressed at the lack of reward or meaning in their employment and get depressed. Now they have an 'illness', because they no longer want to turn up for work. Cyclical reasoning. There are certainly many mental illnesses that aren't covered by this, but I think that when comments are made about 'declining mental health in society' - it's really just throwing diagnoses at the fact that we're becoming more cut-throat....

300baud 11y ago
Definitely. If people talked about physical illness the same way we did about mental illness, we'd diagnose anybody below than the 30th percentile in height with High Shelf Access Disorder and try giving them growth hormones. Mismatch to an artificial environment is not necessarily a disease. This Philosophy Bites episode on "Categorizing Mental Disorders" has some good material on the topic: http://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on-categorising-mental-disorders.html http://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on-categoris... And there's a lot of good work under the label "medicalization of deviance".

jokoon 11y ago

I don't think authority is the problem, what bothers me more, is how passive consensus somehow reinforces some ideas more than others, and that can make them difficult to challenge them. So in a sense, I think that there is a transparent "consented" authority, which is harder to challenge. Of course most people are happier in such a society. That's true, you can't really tell if the person is insane or just having an opinion about something.

tristor 11y ago

Having experienced some of these things in my own life, I can honestly say that I do believe that being an anti-authoritarian is often mistaken as a mental problem. I believe that authority is the wielding of power by an institution or individual, and power is only useful if you voluntarily cede control (this doesn't apply always, but does in 99% of cases). Refusal to cede control returns that power back to you. People who /believe/ that they have power over you, when proven that they don't, by your inability or denial of compliance get irrationally angry and tend to think that it makes you a terrible person. I consider this a selfish response, if perhaps a natural one. To truly live in a free society we must be okay with having power over us when the situation requires (such as at work), while also being okay with rejecting power when our morals and ethics demand it of us. The issue seems to be that some people have the ability to do the latter, and other do not, always appealing to authority to base their arguments or guide their path. The fact that many of these people who are obsessed with authority end up in mental health professions is not really surprising, since the mental health professions largely base the current accepted practices on cults of personality rather than on scientific inquiry. The fact that I chose a profession where it's basically impossible to BS to anyone who knows anything because the rules of mathematics drive things far more than how eloquently you speak is also not surprising. Anti-authoritarians love facts, facts are a good basis for deciding when to cede power and when to take it back and provide a guiding principle in your life that doesn't rely on another person being an authority over you, even if they are outside your control. Anyway, that's kind of my reaction to reading the article. Definitely interesting to reflect back on some of my life experiences given this context and consider how things could have turned out differently, both for the worse or for the better.

pmarreck 11y ago

Site repeatedly crashes on mobile, thanks to Javascript ads. And this is why I was made to disable my ad blocker by many sites. Thanks, f*ing ad industry. The least you could do is not crash my shit if I allow you in.

dbpokorny 11y ago

Does anyone else find the thought of killing people in position of authority sexually stimulating, or am I just some kind of freak?

Zigurd 11y ago

This overlooks an opportunity: We need a new disorder. Call it Control-seeking Disorder, or CSD. Cop gets in your face? Diagnose him with CSD and require treatment that lowers aggression. TSA bumming you out? Make sure they screen out CSD sufferers. Get them in treatment.

Aqueous 11y ago

"Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously." But there also some individuals who think any authority is illegitimate. I have friends and close relatives who I would characterize as having this personality trait. I also observe that it has a negative impact on their quality of life. They have trouble holding jobs, staying in school, keeping friends, and building personal romantic relationships because they are so resistant to being accountable to any other person - accountability which translates in their mind to obedience to authority. Authority isn't always illegitimate. That's why there is a such a thing as a pathological degree of anti-authoritarian sentiment.

dreamlayers 11y ago

Sanity is defined relative to society and social norms. For example, homosexuality stopped being labelled as a disorder when society's attitudes started changing.

thetruthseeker1 11y ago

I am an immigrant in America. I have had problems with my bosses(American) when I challenged some of their decisions at work. When I challenged their decision in every quantifiable metric, they could not defend it in any way and relented, but then I heard from HR about not following orders in general. I think in American culture there is lot of emphasis on command hierarchy( may be military influenced?) and who wears the pants so to speak, compared to my home country in the east, and I think that may have something to do with it. But I can attest to the the repulsiveness I feel to subtle authoritarianism where orders are sneaked in along with regular conversation.

bcheung 11y ago
It depends a lot on where you work. I have worked at places where I have delivered what I thought were superior results compared to what they were asking but they were upset because it wasn't exactly what they asked for. Other places give a lot more authority and a wide latitude. Startups tend to be a lot more flexible in this regard and it is why I prefer working at startups vs enterprise companies.

hyperpallium 11y ago

The majority is always sane, Louis.

eevilspock 11y ago

Prior discussions of this piece: 206 comments, 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5674438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5674438 138 comments, 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642570

xlm1717 11y ago

I thought it was particularly interesting when the author talked about differing reactions people had when taking psychiatric medication. It then seems that the effect of psychiatric medication has more to do with the person's frame of mind than any actual effect of the medication. According to the author, if the patient rejects the doctor's authority, the patient can react even more violently when put on psychiatric medication. Even more interestingly, the author goes on to suggest that patients who do take the medication take it to placate authority, rather than for perceived effect. The author uses the example of someone in a highly stressful job taking Xanax instead of marijuana because while they might believe marijuana helps more, they don't take it due to employer drug tests. It leads me to this question: when doctors think a medication is working, do they think so because of actual beneficial effects seen in the patient, or simply because the patient is complying with the treatment?

bcheung 11y ago

Anti-Authoritarian sounds a lot like critical thinking. That's a disease now? "Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not."

alanwatts 11y ago
Critical thinking is heresy to group think.

useYourIllusion 11y ago

I find it quite alarming that the DSM has been wielded as a tool for hospitalizations and forced medication despite providing sparse forensic evidence of the diseases it attempts to diagnose.

Sideloader 11y ago

I have a friend who I've known since first grade. He would never just "obey orders"...he would always try to find out why he was being asked to do something and if the request seemed illegitimate he would refuse, sometimes in creative ways, to honor it. He was diagnosed with ADHD and labeled a "problem child". As we grew older and his ethics and moral compass developed he would supply arguments to back up his actions - he would not rebel for rebellion's sake but because he truly believed his actions were reasonable and justified. In high school these took the form of successfully defying the school's no-hats-allowed policy and under the auspices of a Frank Zappa loving art teacher forming The Anarchist's Club (the tongue-in-cheek logo was a medieval spiked club weapon emblazoned with a circle-A symbol). The Anarchist's Club biggest action was a boycott of a mandatory pep rally for the school's basketball team (we offered to study in the library instead) which earned its 13 or so members a suspension with readmission after a written apology and meeting with our parents. After three days only me, my friend and one other student remained defiant. (Our parents were supportive of our "cause".) We were readmitted after my friend and I went to the town's newspaper and told them our story and a subsequent meeting with the school board which, to our surprise, agreed the offer to study in lieu of attending the rally was reasonable and overruled the principal's authority. After high school we both moved to the west coast to attend college and drifted apart. In the "real world", despite much rhetorical talk of freedom and liberty from all corners, obedience and conformity to an often rigid status quo are expected if one wants to be accepted by, and benefit from, mainstream society. There are exceptions, like entrepreneurship to some extent, and limited room to negotiate but generally defying the authority of supervisors, managers, professors, the law of the land and any number of "superior" people and institutions is met with the crack of a whip rather than an offer of dialog and compromise. Most of us suppress our anti-authoritarian instincts and fall in line with the established order. The more we have to lose, the more we opt for security and predictability over principles and conscience. My friend says he cannot do this. Talking a decade after high school he says he was born without the "conformity gene" and that he can't will himself to do something he feels is unjust or infringes unreasonably on his liberty. He can't, for example, obey a micro-managing boss if his method of working is more productive than the bosses way. If the boss is truly concerned about productivity and the company's bottom line he or she will not force employees to do things one way and one way only. Every person has methods that work for them, but may not work for others, and a boss who does not respect this is, according to my friend, an ego-tripping asshole or a mindless drone in thrall to "management theory". My friend argues that his anti-authoritarian nature has cost him many jobs and opportunities and has made climbing the middle-class career ladder all but impossible. He makes money by buying and selling things on Craigslist and E-bay, freelance graphic design jobs and the marijuana reselling industry. He claims to have no interest in a stable career, home ownership and a family. More than that, he says his disposition makes it impossible for him to submit to arbitrary authority and to shelve his reservations for the sake of a career. If I had just met him I might be tempted to call bullshit and think he's rationalizing his failure after the fact but I've known this guy almost my entire life and his behavior has been consistent since first grade. He has been diagnosed with adult ADHD, an anxiety disorder, depression and other mood disorders. (The DSM even provides a handy "unspecified disorder" category.) One anecdotal tale proves nothing and there is a possible chicken/egg problem here but based on my friend's and, to a lesser extent, my own and other people's experiences I am convinced there are good reasons for the APA or similar group to do an in-depth, independent study investigating the links between mental illness diagnoses and anti-authoritarian personality traits. Given what is at stake, I doubt that will happen any time soon.