Bit of a specific situation but I get a lot of requests from people who watch my videos, that I should stop doing something (or change the way I do it) on account of their OCD.
Its probably worth acknowledging that people professing to have OCD on the internet is perhaps not tightly correlated with actual diagnosed cases of OCD, but theres no easy way to be sure for any specific case.
Real examples:
I brought food to the camera on a tray that had writing on it. The writing was upside down with respect to the camera view. I dont personally care -its a tray, not a book - but someone asked me to be careful to get it the right way up in future, because it made them uncomfortable on account of their OCD.
UK mains sockets often have switches on the faceplate - these are a convenience feature, not primarily anything about safety and so its not unusual to leave them in the ‘on’ position when no plug is in the socket (other features make this very safe). Someone asked if I would make sure to turn them off in future because it was triggering their OCD.
Sometimes its as simple as the camera being a few degrees out of alignment with the pattern on the tablecloth. Sometimes its that I picked up a thing and didnt put it back exactly in the same place. Often its because two things on the screen are not exactly equal - there’s really no end to it.
Of course I sympathise with anyone who has a mental heath condition of any kind, but is it reasonable to ask me to accommodate all of these things - indeed in order to accommodate them, I would myself need to adopt an obsessive pattern of behaviour where would have to check that a growing list of things were not slightly out of order.
And does this kind of accommodation even help? Is it even beneficial to a genuine sufferer of OCD, to have people trying to arrange their parts of the world to fit the expectations of the OCD sufferer?
As someone with OCD, I am suspicious of these requests actually being because of OCD–though I’m no expert. I just know I’ve not been triggered by what others do.
That said, OCD or not, these things probably do make them feel uncomfortable. So the question remains: how much should you accommodate them?
I’d say “if it’s easy enough.” If it’s just something you could do a different way anyways, with no more work, there’s probably no harm.
I’d say that the tray one seems no big deal to accommodate. I have actually heard that the switches were designed in part of safety (but mostly to stop phantom power), and it wouldn’t hurt to flip them off if you remember.
The ones about getting the alignment perfect, putting things back in the exact same place, or things not being exactly equally spaced do not seem like something you can reasonable accommodate. It would just eat up time. Sure, maybe some token effort would be okay, but not anything fancy.
But what seems like “no more work” and what seems like “would be a time sink” depends on you.
And as for the idea that people with OCD need to learn to be okay with it? Sure, but I wouldn’t fact that into anything. Their treatment is between them and their doctor, and not something you should concern yourself with at all.
Don’t let your audience’s problems become your problems. No artist provides a product or service that is in and of itself essential to the welfare of anybody, so there is no obligation to make those kinds of accommodations.
No obligation, sure. But is it in the artist’s interest to make No-Big-Deal changes to a would-be crowd-pleaser — directly for the sake of the audience, but indirectly for the sake of the artist?
Its not so much that any one of the things being asked require effort, its just that I would have to maintain or memorise a pretty long (and doubtless open ended) list of them - I would have to obsess, in a way, about getting the superset of other peoples obsessive matters just right.
That’s a business decision. Deciding whether or not to ignore a potential customer’s request is something I do everyday. Those “little accommodations” tend to add up to a lot of extra work and set expectations that you eventually can’t meet.
If it were me, I would say that’s a hard no. I think it’s ridiculous of a viewer of a video to expect someone to make this kind of accommodation, and if the offending behavior is bad enough that they won’t watch, then that’s the viewer’s loss much more than the maker’s loss. YouTube is a morass of videos filled with awful behavior, and you’re going to pick nits about this sort of thing? Good riddance.
This can’t be said often enough, although I would turn it around: Don’t try to turn your problems into my problems.
It does occur to me that i might be trivialising the effect of whatever triggers I accidentally create. I do try to avoid/warn other types of trigger such as flickering lights or clustered holes, but those things are far easier to generally predict (and in the case of strobing lights, can cause harm if i dont mitigate them).
OCD runs in my family. My father and son were both clinically diagnosed with it. I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, but I’m very familiar with it.
I personally think it’s ludicrous to suggest that you change anything about what you do to accommodate people with so-called OCD. For one thing, as you point out, there’s really no way to know if they have actual OCD or they are just bothered by certain things. It seems to be popular to claim “I’m so OCD!” for the slightest eccentricity or quirky behavior.
For people with actual OCD, this is my opinion, but I think the OCD sufferer needs to accommodate themself to the world, not the other way around. There are effective treatments for OCD— Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a drug-free way to cope with it, but medication is often effective if CBT is not.
For an OCD sufferer to try to just avoid everything that causes them anxiety is to live in a prison of their own making. I don’t think accommodating OCD sufferers is doing them any favors. It’s not like an allergy that needs to be accommodated, it’s an affliction that needs to be treated.
Another detail that has literally only just occurred to me is that, whereas something like strobing lights is a clearly defined problem that people either have or do not have, if I were to write down all the accommodations being requested on the purported grounds of OCD, it would not be very long before the list contained a conflict - person A wants it exactly this way; person B wants it exactly not that way.
Of course, make your video the best you can or would like. Don’t worry about naysayers. They’ll always be there.
It just the nature of putting yourself out there. Someone, somewhere is gonna not like it.
I don’t like videos where any text is backwards. It’s an easy fix but they don’t do it.
It’s not OCD level. I just don’t like it.
I don’t comment on YouTube stuff anyway, but I would never say it triggered me.
If you were providing an essential product or service that your viewers had paid for, then yes you might have some obligation to accommodate reasonable requests. But if these things bother them, they can – you know – just not watch.
Most of us have issues of our own that require our attention and it’s pretty presumptuous of these viewers to ask you to tend to their problems instead, especially if it diminishes whatever psychological reward you get from making the videos ( of which I’m a big fan, BTW. ) We seem to be living in an era of aggressive victimhood.
Over the last few years, there are an increasing number of people who expect whatever media they consume to conform to their particular requirements. It is unreasonable to expect you to cater to the whims or needs of every member of your audience. Nor do I believe getting the rest of the world to cater to your whims or needs is a healthy way to deal with whatever problem you might have.
I don’t have OCD, but now I wonder if those things make viewers feel uncomfortable in anything like the same way that seeing errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, word usage, etc. make me feel uncomfortable.
Those people should probably be watching the Anal Retentive Chef.
It’s also a stylistic choice often paired with holding a lav mic in your hand. It connotes authenticity.
I’ll admit that it wasn’t until too recently that I realized that those videos with a person writing, from their perspective, backwards so that for the viewer the writing is the right way round were mirrored. I never registered that they all write with their left hand.
These people, who seem to think everyone else needs to change everything to suit their idiosyncratic preferences, unfortunately cause me to have a less sympathy for people who actually do have OCD but who are not self-obsessed assholes. This is too bad for them but I can’t help it, it’s how my special brain works.
We have a great swathe of humanity that thinks the world owes them comfort in their own skin.
Your comfort is your personal responsibility. If you can’t achieve it looking at random videos online maybe you should quit looking at random videos. If it’s a paid subscription, cancel it.
Being an asshole to get your comfort addressed is beyond the norm.
Heck yeah, I want to be comfortable and happy looking at stuff. But I have a mouse or finger that can achieve what I want. Works real well. Perfect, in fact.
I wonder if this is, in part, what comes from being able to stay within our own little media bubbles in a way that was much more difficult 20-30 years ago.
