See this right here? This kind of thing needs to stop.
It’s difficult to watch TV, or go to a pub, or sit on a bus
these days without hearing some person say ‘I’m a bit OCD’, normally because
they are particular about things, like the cleanliness of their house or the
categorisation of their record collection.
When I hear this, I sigh, and roll my eyes at a friend who knows
why I’m irritated, which is all of my friends, because I tend not to make
friends with people who are that clueless about mental illness.
This image however, this is my line in the sand. This has
been reblogged into my tumblr feed by people whose feeds I otherwise like, who
I have reason to believe are nice, smart people. A crochet version of this image has been reblogged by This is Not OCD -a great tumblr pointing out instances
of this very problem, saying that it is an offensive comparison.
Let me talk a little bit about OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
is an anxiety disorder in which the sufferer has distressing intrusive thoughts
that they need to neutralise through some action or thought, sometimes that may be a
cleaning task but it can be literally anything. If the compulsion is not acted
upon the believed repercussions are catastrophic.
There’s an episode of This American Life that tells the
story of Cathy whose OCD presented in the form of eating non-food items,
resulting in many near fatal injuries and more than ten years of forced
restraint in an institution. She believed if she didn't act on the compulsion
to eat these items her or her mother would die.
I went to a BPS lecture on OCD a while ago and the
psychologist giving the talk got us to do an activity, feel free to give it a
go yourselves. He asked us to write the name of the person we loved most in the
world in the middle of a piece of paper. Then he got us to write ‘I hope
___ is violently killed tomorrow’ around
it.
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