Do you have OCD? What's it like?

In My Humble Opinion
1

A coworker has OCD. I’m not imagining it: she’s been diagnosed, and it manifests as the stereotypical (and often time-consuming) repetition of truly mundane physical actions. Unfortunately I must avoid providing specific examples, on the off-chance that she might identify herself.

I’m curious to learn more, but as she’s somewhat self-conscious about it, I don’t want to pepper her with a ton of questions.

And so I turn to the Dope. Do you have OCD, or know closely someone who does? What’s it like? Why do you perform these repetitive actions? Is it an uncontrollable automatic routine? Do you have some rational justification in mind for each one, or do you realize that they are truly pointless (except for some non-rational reason)? What will happen if you are prevented from performing one of your usual actions, either by social considerations or by physical force? What eases or strengthens your compulsions? What else should I know that I’m not asking?

2

I think my whole family has OCD to some extent or another and are also somewhere on the Autism spectrum.

OCD is most noticible in one of my sisters, who likes to plan itineraries and have her kitchen “just so”. I have a thing with numbers and, when I was living alone, had a compulsion to go back and check the door to make sure I locked it when I went out.

3

I’ve never been diagnosed with OCD, but I think I may have a touch of it (or maybe they’re just quirks).

Like LS, I do the door thing. Closet doors have to be shut at all times, cabinets in the kitchen and bathrooms have to be completely closed. When I eat, the food can’t touch on the plate, and I eat one item at a time until it’s gone, and then move on to the next thing. Usually start with starch, then veg, then protein.

One other thing I noticed that I do is while I’m watching TV. Let’s say I’m watching channel 424 (our high def channels start around 380), and I want to see what’s coming on next. I click the guide or listings button on the remote, and then I page up until the beginning of the HD channels, and then work my way down through the list one at a time until I get to the end of our HD channel list. This drives my wife crazy, and as far as why I do it, I don’t have any idea. Doing it every other way just feels wrong.

4

I have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but it’s not OCD, it’s symptomatic of PTSD. I have obsessive thoughts and I get stuck on subjects/ideas and have a hard time unsticking. My compulsion is to binge eat and when I’m really anxious, self-harm.

5

Sometimes OCD is a good thing. Give me a job that involves processing forms and I will ensure that all appropriate boxes are filled. Without gaps, if possible; even if it means digging into old files to fill out the gaps.

I was on a data entry job once, compiling an updated membership directory. If one of my forms had a gap in the employment history, I’d go to the boss’s office and get the relevant info from that year’s directory.

6

Did you ever suddenly realize that you might not have turned off the oven/locked the front door/whatever, and you feel really anxious about it, but then go around and around in your head trying to convince yourself that you did really do it and to stop thinking about it, but you don’t actually feel comfortable and at ease until you slap eyes on the item in question and verify? If you’re normal, that might happen to you once a year or something. For someone with OCD, that scenario applies to many things, every day.

It can take a lot of forms, but basically for me the upshot is, “I’ll feel anxious unless I do X.” X for me can be something as random as getting down the garage stairs before the garage door opener finishes running. Or it can be imagining every detail of the Ariel Castro kidnap victims’ lives during their captivity, due to my sensation that the horror of the story won’t leave my brain until I’ve run it through completely to its “conclusion.” Or running detailed scenarios in my head of what I will do if it turns out my five year old fell in the bathtub and drowned, as a method of somehow trying to fend off the psychological stress of (what should be) normal, necessary risk management.

When I was really bad off, postpartum, it also involved intrusive images, like seeing myself hitting my newborn with a hammer. Note that these were not impulses or plans - completely the opposite. They represented an extreme level of bad-scenario running - a constantly expanding catalog of “things I must be careful not to let happen.”

Boiled down, OCD is anxiety, and the set of counterproductive mental habits and behavioral patterns that an individual develops to cope with it in the short term.

7

I would say mildly OCD. If I’m having dinner and someone’s plate isn’t straight, it has to be turned so it’s right or I have a hard time eating. If I’m at church and someone in the pews ahead of me has put one of the hymnals in backwards or upside it’ll distract me from the Mass. If I eat M&M’s, I have to sort them all and put them in ROYGBIV order before I can eat them. Collars that aren’t properly down drive me crazy, and I’ve been known to ask strangers if I can fix their collars. The thing is, I don’t see how other people *can’t *see these things and want to fix them. How can you just not notice stuff like that?

Fortunately, all these are pretty much self-indulgences and not debilitating, like compulsive hand washing or not being able to leave the house because you’re afraid the stove’s on, even though you’ve checked it 5 times.

StG

8

Remember, OC behavior doesn’t rise to the level of a Disorder unless it causes significant distress to the person who has it.

Most people are tiny bit O or a tiny bit C, or both, about something at some point in their lives.

9

Me with the deadbolt a few mornings: “You’ve checked it, like, five times! Get to work already!”

10

I don’t. But when I was a teen I had a friend who, in retrospect, was definitely in that realm. I don’t think it was even known as a disorder back then (60s). But I noticed that when driving the car, he would adjust the volume on the radio, then touch all of the preset buttons two at a time, outside in, then inside to out. He was also weird about the accelerator; riding with him was like being on an amusement park ride: surge, let off, surge, let off. It could make you seasick. I also noticed him surreptitiously touch things like light switches when leaving a room. He had no idea why he did those things.

11

NM.

12

I have been diagnosed with it…but because it only rarely rises to the level of “disruptive”, I don’t ever think of it in terms of a disorder. But technically, I meet the criteria and probably should be more accepting of the label.

What I have is a rare subtype. “Obsessional slowness” is what it is called in the literature. It is not a conscious compulsion. That is to say, I don’t intentionally make myself do anything. “It” just happens. I’ll come to a doorway and be “unable” to walk through it. I will suddenly be “unable” to cross a crack in the sidewalk. At the approach of the end of the sidewalk, my feet will suddenly turn leaden and I will be “unable” to walk. Sometimes I dissociate and realize that I have been frozen in place for some time. Obessional slowness is associated with a number of disorders (autism and Down’s Syndrome are two off the top of my head). It seems to be in that gray area between OCD and motor psychosis (catatonia).

As frightening as it sounds, it is more frustrating than anything else…especially when it happens in public and I’m called to explain myself. Which I can never adequately do. I don’t have seizures, but that’s what it feels like. I just tell people that I have a neurological quirk and leave it at that.

I also have repetitive thoughts that can either be classified as “Tourettic” or “pure-O OCD”. I choose the former because it’s just annoying noise, not anxiety-inducing. And I have Tourette’s anyway. It may be that the slowness stuff is really just a complex tic. The distinction btween OCD and Tourettes isn’t clear in some cases. I think the two disorders are variations on the same theme.

13

And even then I don’t think it’s necessarily OCD, but like with me my shrink says I have OC tendencies (along with dissociative episodes) due to complex PTSD. I guess I could have two disorders (or three with DD?) but from what I’m told just because you have symptoms of one disorder doesn’t mean you have THAT disorder.

Am I right here?

14

It’s like having an itch. It would bother you not to scratch it, either a little or a lot, depending on how bad it is.

My OCD isn’t severe, I don’t have to check things over and over again or anything, but certain things just really bother me. I can be exhausted and in bed seconds from falling asleep and then notice something is askew, and I REALLY don’t want to get up and fix it, but I have to. It’s like if I’m in the same situation but really have to use the bathroom.

Some things are more mild though. It bothers me to use pens with black ink instead of blue, but it’s not a big problem. But ceiling lights being on without lamps also being on in a bedroom or a living room makes me crazy. I tried not to bug my daughter about it because she would always turn on just the ceiling light in her room, but then I just find myself avoiding her room completely. If the door is open I don’t even want to look at it. So she knows my quirk and tries to accommodate it, because it’s not a big thing. I can imagine how hard it must be for people who have much more severe OCD to the point where it really interferes with their lives and the lives of people around them.

15

You have to round 5s up and 4s down. Good thing we have people to check it. Calculators just add useless dcimals.

16

Preach it, brother.

I was in therapy for a bit a couple of years ago and got a whole alphabet soup of probable diagnoses. One was OCD. My therapist came to that conclusion after I had answered a bunch of questions and then told him a bit about my habits. I’m not so rude that I go around fixing everybody’s “mistakes” but I did tell him that my sister sucks at hanging pictures and the crooked frames all over her wall make me uncomfortable enough that I either fix them all (and I feel like I can because she’s my sister) or we sit outside. Seriously.

So he gets up, walks over to this picture of a ship at sunset, sets it off center just a tiny little bit, and then sits back down like, “Now what?” and made me detail all the craziness that happens to me when I’m put in an uncomfortable situation. It sounded like a panic attack.

So there’s the whole “must be centered” thing, which applies to everything that really ought to be centered anyway so I don’t happen to think this particular thing is such a big deal anyway. Pictures frames, furniture layouts, centerpieces, etc. Those things should be centered and, really, balanced. If you had 12 pictures to hang on one wall, would you put all 12 to one side? No, you would spread them out (right?). It would be balanced. Totally normal, I think.

I’m a hand washer. I don’t constantly wash my hands all the time but, for whatever reason, if I’m upset or stressed or otherwise having a bad time of things, my hands just feel dirty. Kids not listening? Wash the hands. Overwhelmed because the phone just keeps on ringing? Wash the hands. That sort of thing.

I like to have things fairly well organized. It doesn’t make sense to me to have a shelf full of kid movies with The Expendables tucked between Cars and Finding Nemo, so I separate by genre. Again, like the “centered and balanced” thing, it’s just common sense. And then I group together the sequels of movies (again, makes sense) and then sometimes I group by actor just so I don’t say “I want to watch a Ben Stiller movie…” and then have to search around for all the different ones. It’s a problem when I have movies with one actor but the movies are all in different genres. I have to compensate for that somehow and I do. Though I wouldn’t be able to tell you how without checking out my movies and I know the toddler was messing around with them the other day and I don’t feel like dealing with it right now so I’ll just bask in my ignorance of how terrible it must be.

And I have a numbers thing. I don’t think this one is very disruptive at all but certain number characteristics please me more than others and people like to fuck with me because of it. My dad thought it was the silliest thing ever and would intentionally go against it just to see what would happen (in a totally lighthearted, teasing way; his “food can’t touch” so I think he gets it to some degree and wouldn’t be a jerk intentionally): I have to (prefer to, really) have the TV volume on an even number or one divisible by five. The number of “things” that I have in a set are pretty much the same way (number of plates or glasses or knives, whatever). I say “not disruptive” but I know that my oldest will adjust the TV volume for me without any prompting if he turns it up or down and lands on an odd number. I don’t even remember ever telling him to do that and I honestly don’t believe I ever have. But he must have picked up that I would always adjust the volume slightly and then noticed that it always landed on a particular type of number? Or maybe he’s heard me talking about it. Smart boy. That’s kind of sad though. I also silently count things. Most of the time I don’t even notice I’m doing it right away; I’ll be folding towels and suddenly start “hearing” myself saying “… five… six…” in my head. I don’t start over if I lose count or anything though. On preview: I do start over. I won’t re-fold all the towels I already folded but I will continue to count, starting with one, the rest of the towels in the basket. It’s like I can’t stop counting once I’ve noticed I’ve started.

No repetitive behaviors, like flipping light switches five times. No obsessions about whether my door is locked or if I remembered to turn the oven off, or whatever. No rituals, like having to touch all the corners of all the fax machines every time I go to Kinko’s, or Chef’s friend who messes with the preset buttons in the car.

All that said, and ignoring the fact that my kid will adjust the volume to accommodate me, I really don’t think my issues affect the people around me. Like I said, I don’t go around “fixing” everything that I find wrong with everybody else unless I’m really comfortable with them, like with my sister’s pictures. As an example, I noticed just today that my girlfriend has three stars up on the wall above her couch but they aren’t centered at all, either on the wall or with the couch. I washed my hands and then ignored it. And then we went outside, ostensibly to enjoy the weather and let the kids run around. Not a big deal.

17

Me too, except NOT 15. It’s pretty weird, because where does something like that even come from? I have no trauma associated with the number 15. I am not in any way dreading the year 2015 when my daughter will turn 15. But I will not turn volume to 15. No way. Why would I, when 14 or 16 are so much less bothersome?

18

Re your preference for centered things, it isn’t common sense to everyone. Check out “asymmetrical balance” in art, nature, landscape and interior design. Outside of bilateral symmetry, perfect symmetry just doesn’t occur in collections of objects naturally. Asymmetrical balance is a common theme, much more common than symmetry especially in art. Objects too pat and perfect just appear too contrived to be believable or aesthetically pleasing. Refer to Japanese landscapes or Central Park for easy to spot examples of deliberate asymmetry in design.

I’m not correcting you, just wanted to let you know that some people who prefer a more natural look aren’t lazy or inept at centering or arranging things in odd numbers or configurations to bug you. They just have a different aesthetic sensibility.

19

See, and I much prefer 15 to 14 or 16. My husband was like “… wait. They’re both even so WTF?”

And I just shrug and say, “I don’t have an answer for you.” And then he turns it either up or down by one and it’s fine.

20

Oh, I know that. That’s why I don’t go around correcting people all the time. But I don’t think my sister’s picture frames are crooked on purpose (I know they’re not because I do the “bitch and fix” while I’m there and she just says, “I know! I’m terrible at hanging things straight!”) and I don’t think the stars on my friend’s wall are off center on purpose. Argue that centerpieces shouldn’t be centered though. :stuck_out_tongue: You’d be amazed at how many people have off center centerpieces. It’s right there in the name! It doesn’t make sense! :wink: