If you are trying to make sense of a child who argues, refuses, pushes back, or explodes around adults, it is easy to locate the problem inside the child.

That move has a name: deficit ideology. It treats behaviour as proof something is wrong with a young person, rather than asking what they might be responding to, surviving, or refusing.

This is often where a diagnosis enters the conversation. In schools, a common one is Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD).

ODD is described as a persistent pattern of angry or irritable mood, argumentative or defiant behaviour, and vindictiveness over time. It appears in the DSM-5-TR. And yes, if you strip context out of the room, parts of that description can sound like adolescence.

But here is the part schools rarely say out loud. Even when a diagnosis is “real”, it can still do political work. Historically, that work has often looked like this: turn resistance into pathology, so power does not have to answer for itself.

What this is, and what it is not

This is not an argument that children do not struggle, or that mental distress is made up. It is an argument that diagnosis is rarely neutral. It reflects the values of its time and the needs of the institutions that use it.

Foucault’s work on madness makes the wider point: what counts as “disorder” is shaped by power, culture, and control, not only by care. So when we ask “What is ODD?”, we also need to ask: what does the label allow us to stop noticing?

Diagnosing deviance: the same move in different outfits

Across history, different groups have been labelled “disordered” for different reasons, but the logic repeats:

1. A group challenges the social order, or simply does not fit it.
2. The system reframes that “problem” as something inside the person.
3. The person becomes the site of intervention, not the conditions around them.
4. Control gets rebranded as care, and power stays comfortable.

Gloria Ladson-Billings has long pushed us to read policy and practice in their social and political context, not as isolated “choices”. That matters, because none of these diagnoses appeared in a vacuum.

Let’s walk the chain…

Drapetomania: freedom as a mental illness

In the 19th century, Samuel Cartwright proposed drapetomania, a so-called disorder to explain why enslaved people ran away. Wanting to be free was framed as irrational, and therefore medical. The “treatment” was violence and forced labour.

A person resists being owned, and the system calls it sickness.

In The Protest Psychosis, Jonathan Metzl shows how psychiatric ideas have been shaped by race and power in the US, and how racist “science” gave institutions a language to justify control.

If drapetomania teaches us anything, it is this: once you can label resistance as pathology, you do not need to confront injustice.

Hysteria: women’s pain as inconvenience

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, hysteria became a bucket diagnosis applied to women whose emotions, distress, or refusal to comply with gendered expectations were seen as “too much”.

Foucault points out something brutally revealing about hysteria. It became a catch-all when the cause of a woman’s suffering was unclear, or when the professional did not know what they were looking at. The label covered ignorance. It turned complexity into a neat story that protected authority.

And the control function did not stop at naming.

A 2023 paper by Dofman and Reynolds on hysteria’s legacy shows how hysteria was used to discredit women, and even to cover over experiences of sexual abuse, by treating what happened to them as “symptoms” rather than harm.

So again, the same move. A person reacts to oppression or violence. The system diagnoses the reaction. The original harm disappears from view.

Homosexuality: desire as disorder

The same logic was applied to sexuality.

For much of the 20th century, homosexuality sat in the psychiatric system as something to be diagnosed, managed, and corrected. When that framing started to crack, the category didn’t disappear so much as shape-shift. The DSM created “sexual orientation disturbance”. Later, “ego-dystonic homosexuality” did similar work: it made distress about being gay the clinical “problem”, instead of asking why society made that distress inevitable.

And once you have a diagnosis, you have a justification for intervention. The interventions weren’t neutral. They ranged from talking therapies aimed at “change”, to behavioural “treatments” like aversion therapy using electric shocks or nausea, to state-sanctioned punishment dressed up as medicine, including chemical castration in criminalised contexts. 

So again, the same move: name the “problem” in the person, prescribe conformity, and call it care.

Schizophrenia: when Black anger became “illness”

This pattern sharpens again in the mid-20th century US.

Metzl documents how schizophrenia became newly associated with Black men during the civil rights era, especially when anger or resistance was read as “threat”. The criteria and cultural meaning shifted, not the so-called symptoms. 

Kehinde Andrews draws on this history in The Psychosis of Whiteness to underline the point: Black political anger was recast as pathology, and “dangerousness” became part of what the label quietly signalled.

This is not ancient history. It is a reminder that diagnosis can be used to do racial work, and to turn political struggle into personal defect.

And now: oppositional defiant disorder in schools

This is where Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) enters the picture.

In plain terms, it is often read as: this child won’t do what they’re told.

Now ask the uncomfortable question.

In a system where adults hold near-total power, where rules are sometimes arbitrary, and belonging conditional, what does it mean to diagnose refusal as disorder?

Because “defiance” is not a neutral behaviour. It is a judgement made by someone. And in schools, that judgement is not distributed evenly. 

Discipline research repeatedly shows that Black children face higher odds of sanctions than their peers, even when accounting for a range of factors. There is also research questioning whether Black children are more likely to be framed through lenses like ODD in real-world practice.

So when a child is labelled “oppositional”, we need to ask:

• Oppositional to what?
• Defiant of which rules?
• In response to what treatment?
• And who benefits when we locate the problem inside the child?

You may also hear adults reach for PDA (pathological demand avoidance)  often described as an anxiety-driven need to avoid demands and regain control, rather than an anger-driven conflict with authority like ODD. 

The uncomfortable question: when a child refuses, or pushes back, which children do we assume are “anxious” (PDA), and which children do we assume are “angry” (ODD)? And what does that tell us about whose behaviour gets interpreted with care?

The deeper current underneath “defiance”

This stereotype has been rehearsed for centuries.

Long before modern psychiatry, “science” was used to rank whose behaviour counted as rational and whose counted as impulsive and needing control. Carl Linnaeus, often celebrated as the father of modern taxonomy. His race classifications  described Europeans as “governed by laws” and Africans as “governed by caprice”. That is not a neutral description. It is a political one.

That story does not stay in the archive. It leaks into the “common sense” adults bring into classrooms, safeguarding meetings, and project design. It shapes who gets watched, who gets read as risky, and whose behaviour is interpreted as character rather than context.

Now look at how we talk about serious youth violence today. Diversion projects are often championed as the evidence-led antidote: intervene at the point of arrest so a child is not pulled deeper into the system. As Jon Yates at the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) puts it: “Pre-court diversion is not about being ‘soft on crime’, it’s about being ‘smart on crime’.” YEF has also invested almost £18 million in diversion programmes. 

Here’s the link: diversion starts at the moment of police contact. And police contact is not evenly distributed. YEF’s own racial disproportionality analysis shows Black children are over-represented at multiple points in that pipeline, including arrests and stop and search.

This is Linnaeus’s logic in modern clothes. Linnaeus wrote Black people as “capricious”, as inherently less governed, less contained, more risky. Policing follows this logic in practice. Some children are watched harder, stopped more, arrested more. And when YEF’s national “solution” does not challenge that logic, it builds on it.

And once you see that, you cannot unsee it in schools either. ODD can do the same job. It can take a child’s refusal, strip it of context, and turn it into a trait, instead of asking what conditions made refusal make sense.

How the chain links together

Drapetomania, hysteria, homosexuality,  the racialised framing of schizophrenia, and ODD are not the same diagnosis. They sit in different eras, aimed at different groups, with different language.

But they rhyme.

They all show how systems can:

1. Treat a demand for dignity as a “symptom”.
2. Treat emotion as instability instead of information.
3. Treat anger at injustice as danger.
4. Treat refusal as a deficit, instead of a signal about the environment.

And once you see that pattern, you cannot unsee it in schools.

ODD can easily become the modern story that protects adult comfort: the child is the issue, not the school culture, the relationships, the rules, the bias, the material conditions, or the constant demand for compliance.

A more honest question for educators

If ODD, “defiance”, or “behaviour needs” is on the table, try this before you reach for certainty:

What does this label allow the system to avoid changing?

Sometimes the answer is policy. Sometimes it is pace. Sometimes it is adult emotion. Sometimes it is a classroom culture built on compliance rather than relationship. The label can feel like an explanation, but it can also be an exit route.

Where this leaves us

ODD might describe a pattern in a child’s life. It might also be a mirror held up to the adult world, reflecting an environment that is not built for a young person’s full humanity.

Both can be true. The question is what we do next.

We can keep using medical language to turn conflict into an individual problem, and carry on with the same systems that generate distress. Or we can treat moments of refusal as information about power, belonging, and conditions, then redesign our practice accordingly.

If you want to dig deeper into deficit ideology and what it looks like in everyday school life, Class 13’s Foundational Learning programme creates space to notice, name, and choose differently, in community.

Because the goal is not better labels.
It is a better world for children.