What people don’t understand is how damaging and ignorant that phrase is. OCD is debilitating. It’s brutal. It was once ranked by the World Health Organization in the top 10 of the most disabling illnesses by lost income and decreased quality of life.
Because what people who haven’t ever faced OCD up close don’t understand is the impact it has on your life. The way it controls you by obsessively telling you that unless you do this ritual, then something (bad) is going to happen.
One Reddit user ‘IThrowShoes’ aptly described it as:
You don’t want to die, but you don’t want to live. You try to deal with it.
But you can’t. The OCD is cunning, deceptive, manipulative, infuriating, and downright annoying. You fight it with logic, but it grows stronger. It absolutely will not listen to reason.
It laughs at your evidence.
It attaches itself to your emotions, like a leech trying to find blood. It wrestles you into accepting an alternate reality. It plays tricks on your brain. It forces you to see things that aren’t there and hear things that have no sound.
It wants you to believe. You want to beat in its face, you want to curbstomp it, you want to kill it.
You want to take its life. You can’t.
So how do you respond when someone makes this comment?
The option of replying what an uninformed and unhelpful comment that was, whilst tempting, is probably not the most gracious.
There are two options.
- Ignore it
- Educate
Ignore someone who uses OCD as an adjective
The easiest thing is to ignore the comment. To remind yourself that they’re not saying this to be dismissive, hurtful or offensive.
It’s just a phrase they heard from someone else. It’s just a common expression.
Granted, if everyone just ignores it then it will remain a common expression. But it’s probably not helpful going into battle every time you hear it.
Particular examples when I have chosen to ignore it are in large work meetings, brief conversations with someone I don’t know or just when I feel like I don’t have the mental effort to have the conversation.
It is a hard conversation to have and you shouldn’t berate yourself if you do choose to ignore it when someone makes that comment. It’s not up to you to fix everyone’s limited understanding around OCD. Living with any mental health condition can be exhausting, so don’t let this be another thing for you to feel bad about.
Educate the person about what OCD actually means
If the circumstances are right, you may choose to respond to their comment. There are lots of ways to do this in a respectful but clear way.
‘Actually, OCD isn’t really to do with that. It’s around obsessive thoughts that then make you carry out compulsions etc’
‘I know it’s a common expression, but actually, as someone with OCD, I can promise you it’s a bit more complex than that‘
‘Would you mind not using that phrase? OCD is quite a difficult condition and it can be hard for people who have it to hear it being used flippantly’
If it’s a good time and place, it might go on to be a really helpful conversation and that person may come away understanding a little bit more about OCD and be more careful with what they say in the future.
You opening up about something might inspire them to be a bit more vulnerable and have a deeper conversation.
Try not to be obnoxious or scathing when you respond, that will put people on the defensive and chances are the conversation will be abrupt and they won’t take the right message away.
Remember most people aren’t trying to actively diminish OCD or patronize people, they just use a phrase without thinking. All you can do is try to educate someone a little.
Am I being a bit of a ‘snowflake’?
Feeling hurt by someone’s expressions can be taken too far these days, so is this phrase just another example that we are now the ‘snowflake’ generation and people can’t say anything these days?
I don’t think so. I’ve looked at it from lots of different angles (including spiritual) but at the end of the day, you’re speaking about an illness in a glib way.
If you made glib comments about cancer, diabetes, or Alzheimers, you can be sure people would be upset (and rightly so!). Everyone knows someone who has suffered from these illnesses.
But there still seems to be an acceptance to joke about mental health illnesses still, and it’s really time we stopped drawing a line between physical and mental illnesses. ‘I’m feeling properly depressed today’ ‘she’s scizo’ and ‘I’m a bit OCD’ are all phrases that need to be retired.
If you’re about to say something and if you put in a physical condition instead of the mental health condition and it doesn’t seem appropriate, then it probably isn’t.
Let’s collectively do better and remember mental health illnesses are just as real as physical illnesses.
