When I was 12, I was diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder (because I was angry at my physically/emotionally abusive mother). One time my mom was tickling me, and I told her to stop three times but she didn't stop. I pushed my mom off of me. My mom went to my therapist and told her that I hit her without any context (and I was too embarrassed to tell my therapist anything).
My therapist almost sent me to a juvenile detention center. The only reason that she didn't was because having six months of therapy was a requirement before I could go to the center, and my mom and I moved away before the six months could be completed. What do you think could've happened to me if I went to a juvenile detention center? Would I have ever had access to a lawyer at any point in the process?
And this is why Oppositional Defiant Disorder is fake fake fake!! It depends on reports from adults, and adults are eager to portray themselves as entirely reasonable and teenagers as just crazy idiots.
When the ODD label gets slapped on a child, parents have no responsibility apparently for when a child habitually responds badly to authoritarian control. Nor do teachers, or systems; disabilities are suddenly irrelevant or their very existence is doubted.
ODD: fuck that child, in particular, but like clinically.
Okay, if you were in America, your therapist could not have just sent you to a juvenile detention center. There are a couple things that could have been happening here that you misunderstood or that were not explained to you. (People also tend to stop explaining things to kids diagnosed with ODD.)
Your therapist could have been referring to a youth mental health facility. Some of these are locked and do look and feel a lot like juvenile detention centers, and the locked facilities also do a lot of work with kids that are involved with the juvenile justice system.
Your therapist could have been threatening/offering to file something in court that could have ended up with you in detention. This could either be criminal charges (how dare you assault your mother);
Or it could have been an alternative civil type of case that's very common but called many different things in many different states. The civil charge is basically "hello I would like a judge to help me parent my child" and historically involved determinations of "incorrigibility." Now it's usually something involving determining if the child is at risk or in need of services or something.
Youth Mental Health Facility: this would have been undoubtedly the potential worst and also the potential best of the three options, depending utterly on how garbage your mom was going to be and what facility you ended up in. Those mental health facilities are rife with horror and abuse, as you might expect from anywhere containing a whole population of people who are habitually not believed and who have extremely limited legal rights.
Depending entirely on who is staffing the place and how vigilant and focused they are, their leadership, their ability to set goals and keep the kids first, some of those facilities... actually... are pretty good. I actually think architecture might have an influence on this too: if it looks more like a prison, it's going to end up with the staff acting more like it's a prison. I toured one of our higher-security locked youth facilities before, and they were super eager to show me their classrooms, their counseling rooms, and then... a blank hallway painted friendly colors, with a room coming off of it that had padded walls. I was like "wtf is this" and they were like, this is actually the pacing hallway! If kids are having a meltdown, they can come here any time with a staff member and yell and punch the wall and have a talk about it!
Court Filing: If you got a criminal charge, you would have gotten someone like me (ideally; the access to decent lawyers for youth is. spotty at best) and (ideally) a guardian ad litem, an attorney to look out for your best interests. This would be because your parent was the "victim" of the charge and so might not be looking out for your best interests. I actually ask for a GAL to be appointed on any case where I suspect the parents might be doing some Fuckery.
If the case was criminal, you also possibly would have gone to detention very briefly on arrest but whether you stayed there would have depended on the jurisdiction, the judge, and the lawyers. My experience overwhelmingly would say: probably you would not be staying in detention for a push unless your mom refused to have you back at home.
If you got a civil case, you would have gotten an attorney who's not quite like me. As a public defender, I specialize in criminal defense and I have the backing of my office and lots of training. Attorneys for civil cases for kids (which can still end up with them in detention) vary wildly in experience, commitment, general intelligence, and whether I have ever low-key wanted to throttle them.
Either way, you probably would have gotten stuck going back to court pretty regularly for a while to prove that you could shape up and be better (TM). During this process, you would have to behave orders of magnitude better than, just for a random example, the President of the United States, under constant provocation, with no right to privacy or autonomy, and the penalty of detention if you failed.
For more general information, I actually super recommend John Oliver's Last Week Tonight about Juvenile Justice, which is on Youtube. He is correct about basically everything and it's so satisfying to see it laid out like that. In fact, for most of what he describes I've personally known cases where it's happened.
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