Uninformed remarks about obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can fuel stigmas about the condition. Educating yourself on OCD, avoiding minimizing comments, and encouraging effective treatment can help you better support people navigating the condition.
Living with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can be challenging enough, and widespread misunderstandings about the condition don’t help. Many people with OCD find themselves constantly correcting misinformation—from the idea that everyone with OCD is clean and organized, to the belief that the condition doesn’t exist at all.
Even well-intentioned people can end up mischaracterizing or minimizing the experience of living with OCD. Like many mental health conditions, OCD is complex, and can be difficult to understand if you’ve never experienced it—especially since the primary symptoms of OCD (obsessions and compulsions) can sometimes be invisible. It can be tricky to approach conversations about OCD, but there are ways to sensitively acknowledge the condition and provide support, while avoiding stigmatizing comments.
Let’s explore some common negative misconceptions about OCD, why these phrases can be offensive, and discuss better ways to support people living with OCD.
Common misconceptions to avoid
Many people who say offensive things about OCD do so, because they lack knowledge about the condition. So, before we get into comments to avoid, let’s go over some basics. OCD is a real and complex mental health condition. People with OCD experience obsessions—recurrent, intrusive thoughts, sensations, images, feelings, or urges, which cause extreme distress and anxiety. To deal with the discomfort brought on by obsessions, people with OCD engage in compulsions—repetitive behaviors or mental acts. However, compulsions only provide temporary relief, exacerbating the OCD cycle.
As you might be able to imagine, OCD can be debilitating—disrupting daily life, work, school, and relationships. It’s often difficult to stop obsessing and compulsing without support from a mental health professional.
Now that we better understand OCD, let’s dig into what not to say to someone with the condition.
“Everyone’s a little OCD.”
Maybe you’ve got a coworker who often says she’s “a little OCD” because she color codes all of her spreadsheets or keeps her desk perfectly neat. While this comment might seem innocuous, it minimizes the experience of actually having OCD by equating an often debilitating complex mental health condition with a personality quirk. “Just because we have a quirk—[maybe] we like to check the garage door twice or shake the lock a few times—doesn’t mean we have OCD,” Dr. Patrick McGrath, chief clinical officer at NOCD explains. “OCD takes at least an hour of your day, every day.”
People with OCD aren’t diagnosed with “a little” or “a lot” of it; the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) requires clear criteria for an official diagnosis, including:
- The presence of obsessions and/or compulsions that:
- Are time-consuming, meaning they either take up at least one hour per day or considerably interfere with a person’s normal routine
- Cause significant distress
- Impair one’s ability to function at work or in social situations
“OCD is a significant disorder…to say you have a little of it, it’s belittling,” Dr. McGrath explains in a video. “We want to be sensitive to how serious OCD is and how much it interferes with people’s lives.”
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“Why don’t you just stop?”
Many people don’t understand the severity of OCD, and may think it’s easy to simply stop obsessing and compulsing. In reality, recovery is much more complicated. “If people with OCD could stop, they would,” Dr. McGrath says. He explains that OCD doesn’t stem from a lack of will or effort. Consider the example of a new mother navigating postpartum OCD, who sees intrusive images of her child dying every time she holds her baby. This mother isn’t choosing to conjure these distressing images, and she can’t simply avoid spending time with her baby.
Even if you’ve never experienced OCD, you may be able to understand why telling someone to stop obsessing and compulsing isn’t helpful. Imagine someone tells you not to think about a pink elephant. “Once I say, ‘don’t think of a pink elephant,’ well, you’re gonna think of a pink elephant, right?” Dr. McGrath says. Obsessions are intrusive thoughts, and simply telling someone to stop thinking about them typically isn’t effective. It can also be harmful to try to push these thoughts away, as it often ends up giving them more power. In fact, managing OCD symptoms typically involves working with a therapist to learn to sit with intrusive thoughts, rather than simply trying to stop thinking about them.
Obsessing and compulsing takes up significant amounts of time and can be mentally, physically, interpersonally and even financially taxing. Hearing “just relax and don’t think about it” can be infuriating when you’re dealing with distressing, unwanted thoughts and exhausting behaviors that feel impossible to escape.
“You must be so organized.”
Popular stereotypes that cast OCD as a personality quirk often focus on cleanliness and organization, and contribute to unhelpful misconceptions about the disorder. While some people with OCD do obsess about cleanliness, and/or clean as a compulsion, there are many different subtypes of OCD, and the condition affects everyone differently.
“OCD isn’t just washing your hands or straightening something,” Dr. McGrath says. “It’s also pedophilic concerns, sexual orientation concerns, relationship concerns, existential concerns, religious concerns and morality concerns. There’s nothing that OCD can’t grab onto and twist in some way.”
It’s harmful to assume that everyone who has OCD is clean and organized, or vice versa, because it erases the diversity of OCD experiences and mischaracterizes the condition for people seeking diagnoses.
“You’re lucky—OCD can be a superpower.”
Calling OCD a superpower can be othering and inaccurate, since the condition often already makes people feel self-conscious and is usually very challenging. “ It’s not a superpower,” Dr. McGrath says. “No one that I know with OCD would like to give OCD to anybody else…because they describe it as torturous.”
Dr. McGrath says that inaccurate portrayals of OCD in media have contributed to widespread beliefs that OCD is “helpful,” by showing characters with OCD using their mental health condition to solve crimes, or keep meticulous track of things. In reality, OCD compulsions that are sometimes glorified—such as perceived cleanliness or organization—are not simply helpful skills for navigating life; they’re symptoms of an often debilitating mental health condition.
How to have a better conversation about OCD
Widespread misconceptions about OCD often contribute to insensitive comments, but there are better ways to talk about OCD. Here are some ideas for supporting and speaking with loved ones who are navigating the condition.
Supportive statements
Messages of support from loved ones can be incredibly helpful. That might include acknowledging how challenging living with OCD can be, by saying something as simple as, “that sounds really hard.” You don’t need to be an expert on OCD to listen without judgment.
Avoid providing reassurance:
It’s important to understand how reassurance-seeking works for people with OCD, so that you don’t accidentally help a loved one engage in their compulsion, which will make their OCD worse. Reassurance-seeking is a common compulsion where someone asks questions to confirm (or affirm) anxieties driven by intrusive thoughts. Sometimes reassurance-seeking can be easy to spot, but other times it’s more difficult to notice. It may look like asking:
- “Do you think I’m a safe driver?”
- “There’s no way we could break up, right?”
- “Are you sure I’m not a bad person?”
Everyone asks themselves questions like these from time to time, but, for people with OCD, these questions may become all-consuming. Providing reassurance only continues the cycle. Instead, Dr. McGrath recommends providing your loved one with a notebook where they can write down any affirmations you’ve already provided them with. “When they ask for reassurance, refer them to the book going forward,” he says. “That way you can feel satisfied that you gave an answer, and the person with OCD has a choice about whether or not to accept it.” This technique allows you to avoid engaging in repeated reassurance-seeking, while also providing your loved one with a tool that may help them recognize their own behavior.
Encourage effective treatment
OCD usually presents as a lifelong condition, even when symptoms wax and wane—which is why it’s generally not appropriate to ask people with OCD if they’ve been “cured.” However, you can encourage your loved one with OCD to seek support for managing their condition.
The most effective treatment for OCD is exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, which works by gradually exposing someone to their fears, and teaching them to resist engaging in compulsions. ERP therapy is evidence-based and has high success rates, but the therapeutic process can be intense as it involves facing challenging situations head-on, so it’s helpful to have support from family and friends while going through this treatment. Pointing out when you notice improvements in OCD symptoms may be validating for those working through ERP.
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Bottom line
OCD is a serious mental health condition, which can impact all areas of a person’s life. However, it’s also often misunderstood. Comments that minimize or mischaracterize the condition can be harmful to people living with OCD. Instead, we can work to educate ourselves about OCD, acknowledge its challenges, and offer support to our loved ones navigating this condition.
Key takeaways
- Misinformed remarks about OCD often minimize the condition, or accidentally reinforce OCD compulsions.
- OCD isn’t a little personality quirk or a superpower—it’s a significant mental health condition.
- Some people with OCD seek reassurance as a compulsion, but providing reassurance exacerbates the OCD cycle.
You can show compassion to people living with OCD, by affirming how debilitating OCD symptoms can be, and encouraging effective treatment.