When I was four, I was taken to a psychiatric office for the first time. From early ages, my parents were able to notice differences between my siblings and me, differences that were all too familiar to my mother and big sister. Soon after my first visit with a psychiatrist, I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. Genetically speaking, this was no shock. My mother had been diagnosed in college, inheriting the illness from her mother. My big sister received an OCD diagnosis around the same age I did, but two years earlier.
A diagnosis so early in life prepared me to treat my illness effectively. However, the privilege of treating my OCD so proactively — a privilege not afforded to every person struggling with mental illness — still could not comprehensively prepare me for a life of struggling to explain my thoughts and feelings. Fits of rage over the sensory issues caused by the way my clothes sat on my skin, tears over intense bouts of intrusive thoughts. Even to my closest friends and family, I felt as if I couldn’t accurately describe how I was feeling.
This struggle was not aided by the fact that OCD, amongst many other mental illnesses, is so often misunderstood and misrepresented. Many associate OCD with cleanliness, germaphobia, or being a neat-freak. However, what many don’t realize is that fear of contamination is actually just a subset of OCD. OCD is not characterized by one specific compulsion; rather, it is characterized by the cycle of intrusive (or unwanted) thoughts, anxiety, and a compulsion to temporarily alleviate that anxiety.
However, media representations and conversations surrounding OCD tend to characterize the illness with being neat, or tidy. This misrepresentation of OCD leads to the dreaded phrase, “I’m so OCD about that.” OCD can only be diagnosed if it, by nature, is debilitating. That being said, OCD is not an adjective. When we use it as such, OCD becomes increasingly desensitized and misconstrued.
This is not me demanding that everyone pick up the DSM-5 and read about every mental illness identified. However, it’s pertinent to the struggle of those suffering with mental health that we recognize mental disorders as what they are: debilitating illnesses, not quirky adjectives to be used on a whim. When I hear someone call themselves “so OCD” for preferring a tidy living space or feeling discomfort around a sneezing stranger on the bus, I am thrown back into the times before I had the words to describe my illness. The tears cried over trying to explain the panic I was experiencing, but I couldn’t put a finger on what it was. The way I figured that I must be an evil or horrible person for the images that plagued my mind; before I understood an intrusive thought was not me, rather an illness I had that is quite literally characterized by unwanted, distressing thoughts.
I know people that use OCD interchangeably with “neat-freak” do not intend to build stigma around a mental illness. I know they are not purposefully making an attempt to make the lives of those with OCD harder. However, I urge readers to proceed with caution when using real-life illnesses to characterize their non-disordered thinking. Though it may not seem this way to everyone, language is important. There’s a huge difference between saying “I’m so depressed” and “I’m feeling super down” when discussing being upset. Or, the difference in meaning if you were to say “I’m feeling so meningitis today” when you have a cold, because that makes no sense. Characterizing a feeling as a debilitating illness is harmful to those experiencing it. It takes away from their struggle. It implies that the someone feeling an emotion is synonymous with somebody plagued by the symptoms of real illnesses. It hurts real people struggling with real illnesses.
When I was diagnosed with OCD, I prepared for a life of struggling with mental illness. However, I could not be accurately prepared for the way in which I would have to fight to explain myself. To hear my biggest struggle be compared to someone being slightly uncomfortable because something is out of order, or a table unsanitized. This struggle, however, has pushed me to use my voice and first-hand experience with OCD to advocate for myself and others. To make sure people remember that an adjective is not the same as an illness. To defend the little girl that once was crying over the way that her socks squished her feet together. To remind her that somebody is fighting for her, making sure her struggle is not diminished.