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There are several sources for this confusion. Rargh, the comics are askew! Whose eye is twitching? We also commonly (and improperly) use “obsessed” to mean “preoccupied,” as in, “You’re obsessed with that online game!”
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Many think anyone who’s a “neat-freak” has OCD. Or they’ll chide a friend who returns to their car because they were uncertain they had locked it, “You’re so OCD!” - a grammatically challenged phrase, to be sure. “That’s just my OCD,” someone quips as they adjust a crooked picture on the wall. Like many psychiatric terms, “OCD” has found its way into the vernacular, and is often casually used to refer to any person who is overly cautious, or a stickler for exactness.
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Persons with OCD are sometimes known for wanting things “just so,” and for repeatedly adjusting the positions of objects by mere millimeters until it “feels right.” They may become distressed or angry if others move their belongings by even a small amount or fail to return them to their exact position. Thus, a short trip of only a few miles can wind up taking hours. Of course they find nothing there, but a few seconds after driving away, they wonder if they checked thoroughly enough, and they have to go back.
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The driver then feels compelled to turn around and drive back to the spot where they felt the bump to check for a body or injured person lying in the road. Another example is so-called “hit-and-run OCD,” in which the individual hits a bump in the road while driving, and then begins to have the thought, “What if that wasn’t just a bump, but a pedestrian, whom I ran over because I wasn’t paying close attention?” Other contamination obsessions involve fear of chemicals, poisons, or any greasy or sticky substance that might be transferred by touch.īut obsessions and compulsions can involve nearly any event or behavior in which the sufferer fears being negligent and inadvertently causing harm to others. This is usually performed in response to one of any number of contamination obsessions, such as fear of transmitting disease-carrying germs that could cause illness in the individual or a loved one.
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OCD sufferers with this compulsion will wash their hands up to 30 or 40 times a day, often until the skin is raw and bleeding. Many people are familiar with one of the most common compulsions of OCD, excessive handwashing. If each time I return to the stove I must count to five while wiggling the handle to make sure it’s off, that’s a ritual. If I cannot avoid going back to the stove multiple times to check that it is in fact off, that’s a compulsion.
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Obsessions are intrusive, usually negative thoughts that repeat constantly despite efforts to dismiss them, while compulsions are repetitive, often ritualized behaviors that are performed to reduce anxiety, sometimes in an attempt to neutralize obsessions.įor example, if I have the thought that I left the stove on, and it keeps repeating in my head despite my attempts to reassure myself that I did not, that’s an obsession. As the name suggests, it’s characterized by the presence of obsessions, compulsions, or both. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, or “OCD” for short, is a relatively common psychiatric disorder affecting from two to five percent of the population.
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