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.
When you've done this click read more
Now did you do that exactly as written? Or did you cross
your fingers on one hand, think or write ‘not really’, put a pen through it
immediately afterwards, screw/tear it up? In the full classroom where we sat
there was only one person who did not ‘neutralise’ the statement in some way.
But why? It’s just ink on paper, we’re all grown-ups here we
know there’s no such thing as curses. Although we can reason that by writing it
we aren't making it likely to happen, there is a fundamental urge in almost
everyone to banish such ideas because they are too horrible to exist.
Now imagine your mind is flooded with thoughts as horrible
as this one all day long, you would have to neutralise each and every one to
make sure they don’t happen, because if they did happen, it would be your fault
for not stopping it. And when bad things do happen, those are somehow your
fault, from your colleague losing his car keys, to natural disasters, you could
have stopped these things but you didn't. You would think yourself a
monster.
So yeah, I’m sure you do like to keep your house clean but
unless you have to bleach everything in a clockwise circle a certain number of
times or you feel your family will die from the germs you failed to protect
them from, or something comparable to this- it’s not OCD.
The first episode of the channel 4 documentary series Bedlam
focuses on anxiety disorders and shows just how distressing intrusive thoughts
of being responsible for harm to others can be, I recommend giving it a watch
if you’re interested in the topic.
Ok so that’s OCD, now I’m going to talk about why the idea
of ‘OKD’ is upsetting to me personally.
As you may know, I like to knit. As you may not know, I
suffer with anxiety.
It is very difficult for me to relax, I feel like I need to
be doing something productive all of the time otherwise I am wasting my time,
and wasting my time turns into panic that I am going to waste my life and fail
at things and never achieve anything that I aim for. This panic makes it
difficult to think which makes it harder to be productive, and when it was
really bad I used to procrastinate a lot, do very little, and quietly fear the
worst until things came to a head in the form of a deadline or something
similar and it would all spill over.
As I've gotten older I've learnt how to break work down into
small doable tasks so that I don’t get overwhelmed, and I cope in my
student/working life perfectly well most of the time, like anyone else. Free
time is another story.
What I count as being productive and non-productive may seem
pretty arbitrary to an outsider, but to me there is a strong emotional
difference.
It stresses me out to read a bad book or go to a bad movie
because there are so many I know are good that I haven’t seen or read and life
is too short for them all as it is. This leads to ambivalent feelings in
bookshops, I can’t stay too long in one because I get stressed about the fact
that there are so many books I want to read.
If I am watching TV,
I am not being productive- this is stressful. If I am watching TV and knitting,
I am being productive- I can relax a little, but it’s best if I can be
productive in two ways at once e.g. Listening to a ‘worthy’ audio book and
knitting – maximum relaxation.
I really can’t overstate what knitting has done for me as a
coping mechanism. I feel competent in a skill that is creative and other people
appreciate, this makes me feel better about myself and less like a waste of
space.
I really value the online knitting and crafting community, I
feel like they take me seriously for something that a lot of people see as
faddish and trivial. So the above image was a bit of a kick in the ribs, I know
they are trying to laugh at themselves, and that’s a healthy instinct, but
there are ways of doing that that don’t trivialise other people’s problems.
I know I’m not the only knitter who uses it as a kind of
therapy, as I've written about before, but a lot of the knitting community are just
people enthusiastic about a craft (and there’s nothing illegitimate or lacking
in value in that) who may not realise how hurtful jokingly pathologising
something can be to people who have an actual diagnosis and have joined the
community because it helps them.
I think part of the
problem might be that people are belittled for niche interests and activities, especially
ones that take a lot of time and energy, so there comes this idea that they are
‘obsessed’ with it, even seeing themselves this way, when really they are just
turning a healthy amount of attention to something that is more commonly given
to other things, if I swapped the time I spent knitting for playing and watching
football nobody would bat an eye (except people who believe gender stereotypes
I guess).
Obsessions are debilitating, as I've outlined above, and
they don’t make your life better. I don’t have ‘Obsessive knitting Disorder’ I
have a craft that helps me cope with my anxiety, and that’s legitimate enough
for me.
P.S. a good article about this from the Mind blog.
P.P.S. My friend Emma wrote this blog post on compulsion and self-care.
P.P.S. My friend Emma wrote this blog post on compulsion and self-care.
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