What is OCD?
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental health disorder that can be found and diagnosed in early childhood. It causes anxious thoughts and involves obsessions and compulsions, which interfere with daily function.
Obsessions are recurring thoughts and impulses that often cause intense emotions like fear, disgust, or doubt. In response to this obsession, there are compulsions (also known as rituals). For example, an obsession about sickness can be what triggers the compulsion of excessive cleaning. There is a wide array of obsessions and compulsions, ranging anywhere from violent mental images and constant mental review to needing something to be “just right” and constantly seeking assurance from others. While there's no "cure" for OCD, therapy is incredibly beneficial.
Understanding How to Help
In order to help people with OCD, understanding the disorder is essential. Below is a list of what you should not say to someone with OCD:
“Don’t worry, I’m kind of OCD sometimes too”: Intrusive thoughts, obsessive thinking, and compulsions can be experienced by everyone to some level. If you understand that OCD physically interferes with someone’s ability to function on a daily basis, it’s clear that saying such things half-heartedly can make people who actually have OCD feel invalidated from their struggles and experiences. Having obsessive personality traits does not always equate to OCD, and insinuating that it does can be harmful.
“Just relax, it’s all irrational thinking”: In many cases, most people with OCD are aware that their thoughts are irrational, but it often feels like these thoughts are out of their control and simply knowing that an obsession doesn’t make sense will not help. "It's hard to turn away from it," Grae, who has OCD, said in an interview. "It's probably something you don't like to do, but it's something that you have to do. Until you do it, maybe you won't be able to stop thinking about it, or maybe you think that something bad will happen. Maybe the thoughts and feelings hurt you physically, or make you feel physically ill."
“You must love cleaning and organizing”: A major harmful stereotype about OCD is that it’s limited to being obsessed with germs or making everything perfect. There are many more obsessions and compulsions and limiting OCD to two of them can be invalidating. Freeman, whose compulsive behaviors revolve around cleaning sticky surfaces or dirty hands, said in an interview that "The irony is that many people with OCD ... are fairly messy because we get so overwhelmed by things, it's easy to avoid them if we don't feel like tackling it. This creates a feedback loop that is, in itself, triggering – which makes us even less likely to deal with it." OCD covers a wide spectrum of obsessions, so understand that one case does not speak for all of the others.
As alternatives, focus on uplifting things to say to someone with OCD. This could be anything from offering you support or noticing and encouraging improvements. Taking the time to understand and speak positively to people with OCD is a great place to start with helping.
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