Part 2: "He's very particular..."

OCD often gets mischaracterised as merely excessive fastidiousness. As though the sufferer in question simply has a problem with obsessive carefulness, neatness, cleanliness, meticulousness, and so on. At best, this misidentifies the issue, but gives us somewhere to begin when we try to explain OCD to people who have misconceptions about what it involves. At worst, this explanation dismisses the sufferer as being merely “particular” about their life. Unsurprisingly, OCD is more complicated than simply being overly particular, and a lot of the time it’s more crippling than that too.

So, in brief then, what is OCD?

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is essentially a thought disorder. We all have intrusive, unwanted, and unpleasant thoughts from time to time. They are a perfectly natural and normal occurrence, and they don’t reflect or mean anything about the person having them. But people with OCD experience these thoughts differently and ascribe more significance to their intrusive thoughts. People with OCD come to believe that having an intrusive thought involving some horrific action is just as bad as carrying out the action in question. They might also believe that simply because they thought it, it’s more likely to happen or must be true. This is call thought-action fusion, or TAF for short (Kelly, Thought-Action Fusion and OCD, 2019). On bad days, OCD patients are bombarded with unsolicited, often extremely unpleasant, intrusive thoughts which spell out, either explicitly or implicitly, dire consequences for the thinker’s life. These thoughts are then soothed away by the thinker with the completion of rituals, which console them that their terrifying thought isn’t going to become a reality (Hyman & Pedrick, The OCD Workbook, 2010:9). Trying to supress these thoughts becomes and obsession (O) and rituals or compulsive behaviours (C) ensue. Chuck a (D) in there and we’re off to the races.

Bibliography

Hyman, B & Pedrick, C (2010). The OCD Workbook. Oakland: New Harbinger Publication, Inc.

Kelly, O. (2019). Thought-Action Fusion and OCD. 

Available: https://www.verywellmind.com/thought-action-fusion-and-ocd-2510478. Last accessed 14/05/2020.