> Wow Pachy, very enlightening. Didn't know there was a classification for these behaviors. It explains much about 2 people I know/knew.

It doesn't 'explain' anything at all. It merely describes.

If I know already that if you put salt in water then it dissolves and I ask you to explain 'how come?'...
And you say 'salt is soluble' then that isn't an EXPLANATION it is merely a REDESCRIPTION of what I knew already. Attaching a label to something is NOT to EXPLAIN it it is merely to DESCRIBE it. If you had a theory of solubility then that might provide an explanation... But the DSM doesn't provide a theory of oppositional defiant disorder. What the DSM provides would be like if you were to say to me 'soluble things are things that dissolve in water'. Once again: A RE-DESCRIPTION is not at all an EXPLANATION. All it does is introduce a term that is shorthand for the description / observation that we had already.