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Oppositional Defiant Disorder And Mental Health Services

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Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) is one of the most common clinical disorders in children and adolescents (Nock, Kazdin, Hirpi & Kessler, 2007). Greene et al. (2002) defines ODD as “a recurrent pattern of developmentally inappropriate levels of negativistic, defiant, disobedient, and hostile behavior toward authority figures”. ODD primarily consists of stubborn (e.g., tantrums) and aggressive behaviors that the child attempts to rationalize based on the circumstances rather than view as consequential and problematic (Kazdin, 2010). Therefore, ODD can have serious implications for the child’s functioning at home, in school, and in the community, so parents of children with ODD are more likely to utilize child mental health services (Kazdin, 2010). The history, symptoms, diagnosis, prevalence, age of onset, duration, risk factors, comorbidity, and treatments of ODD will be discussed, as well as the rationale behind the revisions from the fourth (DSM-IV) to fifth editions (DSM-5) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The ODD diagnosis was introduced by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry in 1966 and appeared for the first time as a distinct child/adolescent onset disorder in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980 (Nock et al., 2007). In the 35 years since its induction however, not much more has been learned about the disorder because the majority of studies combine both ODD and

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