The misconceptions of OCD The phrase, ‘I’m sooooo OCD,’ has been aimlessly thrown around in recent years, becoming the phrase to call yourself if you’re somewhat clean or tidy. Do you like your highlighters in rainbow order? Must be OCD. Like to keep your room organised? So OCD!! Like to keep your maths book very aesthetically planned out? You get the gist. And while most people don’t mean harm when using this phrase around it is very harmful to real human beings with OCD and how they are being represented. OCD, no matter how you look at it, is a mental illness. A real illness that affects people’s lives daily. So why isn’t it treated as such?
The NHS defines OCD as a condition where a person has obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours. While vague the definition doesn’t say anything like, ’the desire to be clean and organised all the time,’ because that’s not a mental illness, that’s a clean and functioning person. OCD is a serious anxiety disorder where a person has to do their compulsions, so they don’t experience the extreme fear or stress that comes along with it. Well, know compulsions are things like hand washing or flicking the light switch on and off repeatedly but internal mental counting, checking for body parts or blinking. Many people also take a long time to come to terms with their illness and get help and the phrases, ‘everyone’s a little OCD,’ and everyone on your table all unanimously agreeing that they’re all so OCD isn’t helping. And while, yes, OCD can be constant cleanliness and organising things in a certain way it isn’t always, but the media and society seem to have only one view of it. Everyone goes through OCD differently and it is more severe for some. It is a spectrum, same as sexuality or autism and needs to be recognised that way.
Overall the media has done a bad job at representing OCD. Think of one character with OCD and chances are they are either written in for laughs, are a crazy clean freak or both. Take a character like Sheldon Cooper, who is usually regarded as a character with OCD, although never properly stated. Sheldon has an impulse to when at someone’s door, knock three times, say their name three times and then repeat it for a total of three times. He refuses to sit anywhere but his allotted spot on the couch and is very clean and tidy. But all of this goes down the drain as these impulses are played for laughs. The rest of the cast making remarks on the side about how weird Sheldon acts as if that’s how a person with OCD wants to be portrayed. Another example is Emma Pillsbury from Glee and although her real struggles are shown in the show all these problems go away as soon as she starts dating the ‘man of her dreams’, like really?
So, next time you think about calling yourself OCD over how much you like to keep things clean or organised think about how OCD is an actual anxiety disorder that many people suffer from daily and every time you use that phrase it makes it harder for a person who has OCD from getting help for it.
