One thing that I have been incredibly frustrated with lately is the number of people whom I have observed saying things like “everyone has ADHD a little bit.” Or “The fact that you feel stressed around clutter sounds like OCD.” or “You’re over-reacting. You just need to calm down.” And the part that frustrates me the most is the number of times I have heard them in mental health groups or among my own friends and family members who know that I struggle with ADHD and anxiety. Not OCD, though. I don’t have that, but I am incredibly frustrated on behalf of the people that do, and here’s why:
OCD, for some reason, has been associated with people who like things clean and organized. For some reason, if you suggest that you prefer things to be neat and tidy because clutter causes you to feel anxious in a public forum, there will, almost without fail, be a minimum of one person who suggests that you get tested for OCD. I don’t know if people think OCD stands for Organization and Cleanliness Desires, but out of all the cases of OCD that I, personally, am familiar with (and there are only a handful because it’s actually not that common) only ONE of them was obsessed with cleaning, and that was due to the fact that this person believed that the germs which reside on everything can and will make him sick if he doesn’t keep his home clean one-hundred percent.
The other people I have known with OCD had different problems. One had to walk down her staircase every day and if one of the floorboards squeaked, she had to go back up to the top and start over. One had to flip the locks on his door open and closed a set number of times before being able to leave for work or the store or wherever it was he happened to be going.
Because OCD is not the need to keep things orderly that many seem to think it is. It is the brain getting stuck on a certain idea in tandem with an action that the body is then compelled to perform in order to “keep something from happening” or “make sure that something happens a certain way.” The ‘obsession’ portion is the brain part wherein you literally cannot keep yourself from thinking about something to the point where the thought is so persistent that it interferes with your daily life. And as I have learned recently, you only need this half, the obsession part, to earn a diagnosis of OCD.
The second part of the OCD is what you do to alleviate yourself from the obsession. We will go back to the example of my friend with the compulsion to clean. When he was very young, he got a horrible strain of the flu. It made him so sick that he nearly died. As you can imagine, he got the idea in his head that in order to prevent himself from ever getting sick like that again, he would need to keep his house free of all germs. He would need to cook all his own food as well, to ensure that he would never be that sick again. So we have the obsessive, intruding thought– the idea that he will get sick if he has contact with germs– and the compulsion– to keep everything clean. Now, while it’s true that many, many people clean their house because they don’t want germs to take over their home, there is a line in the sand. The point at which it interferes with your daily life.
If I want a clean house, that’s one thing. But if I cannot leave for work or school because I need to clean my house first. If I cannot have relationships because of the state in which I feel the need to keep my house if I cannot live happily because of my need to clean my house, then it is interfering with my life, and that is the point at which it can be considered OCD. See the difference? A lot of people feel stressed around clutter. That is actually more likely to be a symptom of anxiety rather than OCD. Remember, the obsession and the compulsion can be surrounding a variety of issues. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with being clean. The door locking guy I mentioned also had hoarder tendencies. He may have liked to have had a clean house, but it wasn’t in the cards and he wasn’t concerned enough about it to do much.
One of the reasons I started this blog in the first place was to talk about, and as a result, decrease the stigma surrounding ADHD and anxiety, which I personally struggle with, but also mental health in general. If you don’t suffer from something, and if you do not have the educational background to know the ins and outs of it, then maybe refrain from suggesting that people seek that diagnosis. That is really between the person and the mental healthcare professional to decide.
