What is OCD Really?
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a mental health disorder that plagues 2-3% of the population within the US. That equates to just over 6.5 million people throughout the country.
However, despite being so widespread, there are many misconceptions surrounding the disorder and not many people truly understand it. It can also be a very debilitating disease, as the National Institute of Mental Health reports that 50% of adults with OCD reported serious impairment.
Why do these misconceptions exist, and how do you know if you may have OCD?
Symptoms of OCD
There are many different symptoms of OCD.
“OCD says its symptoms in its own name. OCD is made up of two categories of symptoms called obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions look like any unwanted thought but for people with OCD it's usually a very disturbing unpleasant thought,” says Dr. Louise Waters, the Assistant Director for Outreach and Programing at Hofstra’s Student Counseling Services. “It feels like it's really intruding into their life, kind of like the worst billboard that you can imagine popping up in your head.”
Photo by Simeon Jacobson on Unsplash
Photo by Simeon Jacobson on Unsplash
Obsessions can be about a variety of things. They can be about loss of control, contamination, perfectionism, morality and many other topics. As Waters said, these obsessions can be very disturbing to people affected by OCD.
The other symptom included in the name is compulsions.
“Compulsions are anything that a person might do, whether that happens internally or externally, to try and get that thought to leave their head,'' says Waters. “Compulsions might also occur to reassure oneself or to avoid harm to somebody else.”
Compulsions can come in many different forms. There are external ones, which can include checking something multiple times to make sure it is right, tapping something, or performing an action multiple times.
There are internal compulsions as well, which include forcing yourself to think certain thoughts, bargaining and reassuring yourself, and many other thoughts.
Photo by Mitchell Hollander on Unsplash
Photo by Mitchell Hollander on Unsplash
However, there is another symptom that does not appear in the name of the disorder.
“Another symptom of OCD that is not in the name is avoidance, which is not doing certain things because of the amount of distress that it causes you,” explains Waters. “Sometimes people will have intrusive thoughts and they will experience so much fear around these things that they end up not doing them.”
These may not seem like what OCD is generally thought to be. The thought of OCD meaning that somebody is a neat freak is common, but that is just scratching the surface of this disorder.
Misconceptions of OCD
“When people say that it’s involving organization or that they like certain things in a particular way. They say, ‘That’s just my OCD. It’s confused with OCPD, OCD is a completely different thing, says Dr. Thomas Vacchio. “I think that the most common thing is that in vernacular people say, ‘oh that’s just my OCD.’ But it’s not OCD.”
Photo by Dhaya Eddine Bentaleb on Unsplash
Photo by Dhaya Eddine Bentaleb on Unsplash
Vacchio believes that organization and cleanliness is the most widespread misconception about what OCD really is. However, that is not the only misconception about the disorder.
"I’ve seen people think that people with OCD get benefits from OCD. Like that their space is more clean or that they are better able to manage their schedule," says Dr. Waters.
"While some people’s compulsions can be sort of helpful sometimes, they are oftentimes very distressing, it is not something pleasant that people want to be engaging in," they said. "I also think that there is a lot of misunderstanding about how OCD can look. A lot of people expect it to look like watching somebody do something repetitively.”
While these misconceptions may seem harmless, it does not feel that way to people with OCD.
“It really is not fun seeing my disorder minimized throughout pop culture,” says Nassau Community College Junior Hannah Goldaber. “People do not realize what I have to go through on a day-to-day basis. Whenever people hear that I have OCD and they make a clean freak joke it really bothers me. Like I wish that was all it was.”
Photo by Gilles Lambert on Unsplash
Photo by Gilles Lambert on Unsplash
Why do these misconceptions exist?
This begs the question: How did these misconceptions start? Media and pop culture portrayal of the disorder seems to be most psychologists’ guess as to why.
“Probably because of Media, TV, and social media, things like that. Some people say it and it kind of just gets into the lingo,” says Dr. Vacchio.
Dr. Waters also echoed a similar sentiment
Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash
Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash
“A lot of that comes from what we see in media. When you’re watching a movie, you don’t really see the thoughts in the character’s head, you just see the character,” says Dr. Waters. “So you see Jack Nicholson washing his hands with a different bar of soap in that very famous movie that he’s in where he has OCD. And that’s the behavior that you remember about what it means to have OCD.”
How does OCD Affect People?
Even when knowing the symptoms and misconceptions of OCD, it can be hard to detect it. According to Hannah Brock of the National Library of Medicine, “Most who struggle with OCD go undetected for years.”
However, Dr. Vacchio believes that this is not just because of the misconceptions in the media.
“Maybe they don’t want to know. Maybe they don’t want to address it. Change is very difficult,” says Dr. Vacchio. “I always liken mental health and mental illness to body odor. We can see it very clearly on everyone else or that there’s certain issues, but if it’s ourselves somebody has to tell you that you have bad breath. So I think that it’s a combination of those things.”
OCD can dominate a persons’ life already, deciding how they do things and when they do them, making them waste time and precious thoughts on doing things to erase the bad thoughts. However, OCD being so hard to detect means that it normally goes untreated for many years, meaning that effects from the disorder only worsen.
“It dominates their life, it is very difficult. It is intrusive, it is unwanted. I would say it’s very challenging,” says Dr. Vacchio. “And it interferes across social, occupational and relational aspects, it kind of interferes with everything. Especially if untreated.”
More progress has been made on researching and treating the disorder, but it still affects millions of people around the world daily. Maybe one day people will be informed, but until then, misconceptions will keep spreading. Meaning that OCD will go undetected in people for long periods of time, while worsening the effects that they face each day.
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