When I got my gender-dysphoria diagnosis, one part was to look into any other disorders I might have and OCD did come up. The problem is that a lot of these disorders have descriptions that are so relatable that you can feel genuinely insecure.
Even OCD sounded so relatable at that point, that what really ended the discussion there was when my psych asked in the end after I was saying that I wasn’t sure, whether my symptoms were clinically relevant, to which I immediately responded with “no”.
So yeah, it’s probably relevant to remember that most things come on a spectrum and that people can be OCD-adjacent without crossing into the boundary of where it is enough of a problem to be a disorder, but rather a mere personality quirk.
And that’s okay! In both directions!
It’s PTSD now. “Oh my god my last boss gave me PTSD”
“…I can’t trust the physical sensations in my body which are completely out of control, my entire arousal network is wired wrong, and my threat detection system is run amok.”
“Oh, I meant like, he was super mean.”
Trufax. OCD was the autism of the 90s. Everyone insisted they had it. You’re not OCD, aunt helen, you’re just an oppressive control freak. Now it’s, you’re not autistic, tyler, you’re just a self-focused unforgiving dick
Spit your shit indeed
"‘I have to sort my books!’ she cried,
With self-indulgent glee;
With senseless, narcissistic pride:
‘I’m just so OCD!’
‘How random, guys!’ I smiled and said,
Then left without a peep -
And washed my hands until they bled,
And cried myself to sleep."
-Poem for your Sprog
Now that’s a name i haven’t seen in years
Username doesn’t check out 😱
Oh god no. No.
Portlandia: Real Nerd
I really felt bad for this guy because he was clearly genuinely bothered by the topic. I get it.
I believe that ignorance leads people to think / claim that they have OCD. I used to think that I had OCD but after watching a documentary on it I realise that I’m just a little particular about how things should be.
what’s the doc?
For some reason people just love self diagnosing with mental illness.
I think people like rationalizing their behaviors so that they don’t seem weird. When really they are just being themselves.
Behaviors become mental illnesses when they start to affect other parts of your life. Organizing your books by color is unusual and quirky, but not a mental illness.
If you can’t leave a library because you have to organize their books by color, then it’s a mental illness.
My kid has autism. He once had a complete panic attack because we wouldn’t let him stay to organize the bottles at total win and more. He has never been diagnosed with OCD and my understanding after talking to his neurologist about it is that this was a stim for him, and not necessarily OCD behavior. There have been other instances all through his childhood like this one, and I can’t help but think that having a completely different disorder or Neurodivergence also adds to people self diagnosing because there’s way too many people who don’t know they’re neurodivergent.
I was straight up diagnosed with OCD as a child because they really didn’t want to believe a girl had autism. Throughout my life I’ve struggled with compulsions when I’m mentally struggling and had zero issues when things are otherwise calm (sometimes I’ll go years without any symptoms). I’d never thought of it as a stim, but it absolutely is a thing for me to focus on to release mental pressure/sort through inputs. That’s totally a stim.
Sorry to do the thing that this thread is about in the thread.
Don’t apologize. It’s okay to express yourself and there’s nothing wrong with relating your story.
I was diagnosed with ADD (now called ADHD inattentive type) when I was a kid and got basically no support for it because my younger brother was diagnosed with Autism at or around the same time. It turns out my sister also has ADHD (and was diagnosed as an adult), and got no support and stims are fairly common. There’s a lot of behaviors in my own life that I didn’t recognize as stims until years later. It seems a lot of us
feelfell through the cracks so to speak.Huh, organization as a stim. I guess toss another one in the bucket for me.
They have officialdiagnosophobia
It’s a lack of mental health care and education.
I don’t have a formal ADHD diagnosis beyond a questionnaire given by a psychiatrist, and even that was a six month wait to start getting proper meds — a process that continues to be a fucking nightmare. Hospital visits give me near anxiety attacks because I don’t know if I’m going to see a decent doctor or someone who reams me out because I don’t have a “real” diagnoses.
I’m on waitlists for a formal diagnosis and specialized care, have been for years. During that time one of the ADHD institutions shut down over lack of funding. I could have skipped the line by going private and paying thousands, but I don’t have that.
Also in some cases simple ableism:
I am highly certain that I have autism, for many reasons, up to and including the screener results when I got my gender-dysphoria diagnosis, but I have made an active decision against getting an official diagnosis, because it would not as of now bring me any advantages, but would for example rid me of the possibility to ever move to certain countries. So what would be the point?
The main struggles I have are in interactions with other people and that is getting a bit better these days and having a friend group that almost exclusively consists of neurodiverse folks who have learned to deal with some of my quirks and a girlfriend who has a diagnosis of both autism and ADHD helps a lot as well. Why would I then put effort in to get a confirmation for something where I kinda already know the result? It would be like taking an IQ-test (A comparison that my psych found quite fitting in fact).
Every doctor and psyche I spoke to told me an official diagnosis will make it easier to get my medication and care.
ADHD is a disorder, meaning it significantly reduces my quality of life to the point where I require therapy and medication to function. Since ADHD meds are super fun for non ADHD folk, without an official diagnosis I get accused of drug seeking by shitty doctors. I’ve gone months hitting brick walls trying to get meds I’d already been prescribed because of it. I could even get partial disability payments for periods of time I’m unable to work, or unable to find work that fit my needs.
I dropped out of university twice because of ADHD symptoms I didn’t know were part of a disorder at the time, with a diagnosis I could get a modified program.
An official diagnosis for ADHD is not at all like getting an IQ test where I live.
Unless your parents did it for you, idk how ppl who think they have adhd even get diagnosed, I needed to get my insurance changed for the county I was living in at the time or some shit, I never went to get checked again. Had been academically disqualified at that point, somehow did 2 years at community college, got reinstated to the school, and graduated with my bachelors, took me an extra 2 years and I had straight Cs but at least I did it. Now idk if I’ll ever get diagnosed, probably should, I abuse weed and nicotine to “self medicate” helps me focus on one thing at a time.
I think you’re right in the main. And I also think that some people don’t realize they have a disorder until they see it manifest in others and realize “shit I do that too.” Sometimes they are right, sometimes not.
It’s a genuinely dangerous ignorance.
Things like food allergies aren’t taken seriously because Karen doesn’t like onions or seafood and tells everyone she’s allergic. It’s not just ignorance at that point, it’s selfishness and a complete lack of empathy and reason.
I don’t care if Karen can’t eat them because she is allergic or because they taste like shit to her; if she hates them so much, then you are the problem for trying to make her eat something that she hates so much that she feels her only choice is to tell you it’s an allergy.
As someone who is allergic to some foods and has to carry an epi pen everywhere I want to say that I do not care if Karen says they’re allergic to whatever. The problem is people who do not take food allergies seriously and assume that when someone says they have an allergy they actually have an allergy.
If you’re one of those people who have to prove someone isn’t allergic, you’re not just an asshole, you’re an attempted murderer (not you, op, just people in general).
That Karen telling people she’s allergic is a contributing factor to why people don’t take allergies seriously.
OK but let’s think why a person might feel like they have to lie about severity to secure compliance with a food request. I reckon the woman with a name that has transformed during her life into a gendered insult and an actual allergic person share a common struggle, a well-founded fear of betrayal by the person preparing their food.
I have preferences for things I don’t like on my food and ask for removals or substitutions regularly. Sometimes those requests are forgotten or ignored and I will get it remade, or maybe I just suck it up and deal with it if it’s takeout and I’m a half hour from where I got the food. Not once in my entire life have I considered telling people I have an allergy.
So yes, I have thought about why a person might feel like they have to lie about severity, and my conclusion is “that person is a self-centered asshole.”
Okay, but that’s just a preference. What about stuff like lactose intolerance, where it’s not an allergy, but it still makes somebody feel sick?
If you knew a food made you sick, I could understand saying it was a milk allergy to make sure people actually knew it made you sick, even though that’s not the truth.
Sure, that’s not a problem. Calling a legitimate sensitivity an “allergy” for the sake of expediency isn’t a problem. It’s still a legitimate dietary concern that needs similar handling.
This kind of distills down to the “I suffer needlessly, so others should too” fallacy. Perhaps your food preferences aren’t as health-critical as other people’s, but I still think you’d be justified in demanding what you actually paid for more often. And you not doing so doesn’t mean that other people are assholes. Really, I think the food preparer who is inclined to take everyone’s food requirements less seriously merely because they get more food requirement requests is truly a real asshole, way before the person who realizes that framing their preference as a requirement more often gets them the respect that everybody’s preferences deserve.
I literally said that I do get it corrected unless doing so is a huge inconvenience for me.
I don’t lie about why I need special treatment.
People should respect other people’s body autonomy where food dislikes are concerned just like they should for just about every other form of body autonomy. The fact that they don’t is the reason this problem exists.
Yes, a person who asks for no onions shouldn’t get onions, but a dislike doesn’t require workspace and utensil sanitization to the same degree as an allergy.
Someone saying they’re allergic but then getting food prepared on a surface that was just used for the thing they’re allergic to can still have a reaction to it, but it’s perfectly fine for someone who just didn’t want it on their food.
Telling someone you’re allergic when you’re not either creates an enormous amount of extra work for the kitchen staff to avoid cross contamination, or reinforces not taking it seriously because they don’t and nothing bad happened. In both of those scenarios the person lying about being allergic is an asshole.
I’m a former head chef of two kitchens, one that specialized in vegan/gluten free/specific diets. If someone feels the need to lie about an allergy, I don’t care as long as they understand their food might take another minute or two — if that. It doesn’t actually take that much longer. Food allergies are to be expected, it’s up to the chefs to organize their kitchens and train their staff to handle them.
Edit: We used to get Jainists, who don’t eat onions or garlic as a religious thing. So I don’t care what people’s reasons are, I’m there to cook food they like that won’t make them sick.
That’s a fair point. Handling such request is part of the job, and if someone isn’t willing to do that then they aren’t doing their job correctly. I can definitely appreciate that perspective.
It’s unfortunate in both cases that someone with a preference and someone with an allergy don’t always get the appropriate response, but I still maintain that someone without an allergy saying that they do is just making things worse.
Someone with an allergy can be just fine with cross contamination if their allergy is mild.
But it’s people like Karens that perpetuate the reason people don’t believe it.
If they didn’t misuse the word, people would take it more seriously when they were told.
I still find the people at fault who deliberately ignore the boundaries of people who say they don’t like a food. I’m unfortunately allergic to things I actually really do like, and wish I could eat.
If someone doesn’t like something (their age doesn’t matter here), we should be more respectful of their autonomy over what they put in their body. Having to claim an allergy in order to have that taken seriously is the nuclear option after saying you don’t like something doesn’t work/isn’t respected.
That people like me with allergies receive some of the fallout of that is still on the people trying to force others to eat foods they don’t want to or shouldn’t.
I’m there with you. I’m properly allergic to a few foods I really love, including almonds and (non-celiac) wheat. My wheat allergy is just mild and I can avoid some of the fallout if I pop a Benadryl first. It’s likely an extension of my severe grass allergy, which also doesn’t kill me.
Many people don’t understand food allergies, thinking food allergy means instant anaphylaxis. That’s when you see these “purity test” bullshit posts where the waiter refuses to serve the person “faking” an allergy for their own safety (and I’m sure everyone claps). I can eat about a pancake’s worth of wheat once every week or two and just be a bit uncomfortable for awhile. If I ate like a whole pancake breakfast? It gets ugly and uncomfortable, sometimes for a few days.
So if I snag a bite of my partner’s pancake, I’m not faking an allergy. My self-control just sucks sometimes.
This reminds me of people who get upset when somebody in a wheelchair stands up or walks. Some people have disabilities where they can physically stand and walk, but only for brief periods. So if they need to reach a can high on the shelf and nobody’s there to help them, yeah, some wheelchair users will stand up and get it themselves. It doesn’t mean they’re faking, or looking for attention, or whatever other bullshit such judgemental asswipes come up with.
Likewise, people with allergies can have reactions that differ from person-to-person and that range in severity. It appears so obvious, which makes it wild how some folks can’t seem to comprehend that people can be different from each other.
Conversely if people just honored dietary requests without question we probably wouldn’t have nearly so many people who feel like they have to lie about severity to secure dietary request compliance. In all cases the buck stops with the person making the food.
The biggest issue with most of these issues is that everyone has something a little bit like them. Everyone gets distracted or washes their hands or is sad. The difference is how much that thing interferes with your life. My ADHD causes all kinds of major problems just from the executive dysfunction side alone, let alone some of the other joys that come with having it. People want to feel special in any way they can and sometimes cosplaying their mental health is the way.
People also tend to point towards the most extreme versions of ocd in response. I have diagnosed ocd and it’s just the way my anxiety disorder manifests. I get fixated on a point of anxiety and spiral around it and before treatment would develop rituals to prevent those points. Locking the car door three times meant I was sure the door was locked for example.
I still have low key anxiety every time I go on vacation that I left the door unlocked
I feel people should instead say they’re neat/organizational freaks. The idea actually comes across accurately that way rather than making people actually believe you have a neurological condition.
For me it’s the opposite. Simply because I like to stay organized and prepared, everyone keeps telling me I have OCD. I don’t think I do. Maybe?
And then the same people go watch videos of “oddly satisfying” organized things.
One of the major diagnostic criteria is that it gets in the way of you living your life or your happiness.
Fastidiousness is not a personality disorder.
I think that my Mum might have had undiagnosed OCD.
She used to get up at 5am to tidy and clean the house before we got up for school and she’d clean it again when she got home from work, she’d clean everything as she went along and tidy up again before bed. It definitely negatively affected her life on a day to day basis by three or four hours a day.
Even if you have a minor form of OCD. OCD right and proper gets actively in the way of living. Indirect unintentional self harm either in mental or physical is not uncommon.
Unmanageable OCD is scary. Had a good friend in high school with serious OCD issues, which lead to hoarding issues and them passing away a few years back due to none of their family helping them and the mental health support in the USA being awful.
OCD is a spectrum disorder like autism. If you think you have it ask a mental health care professional. Most of the time its very manageable and has no impact on your quality of life. But it’s better to seek help earlier then later.
That all said, there’s a good chance the book girl in the comic is autistic or has OCD. But not in a major form of them.
If you like everything to be organized, you don’t have OCD. If you like everything to be organized and fly off the handle and become extremely upset to the point of life problems when things aren’t organized… you STILL don’t have OCD (but you might have OCPD or autism or BPD or something else).
If you don’t really like organization all that much, but are irrationally terrified that your loved ones will die if the cleaning supplies aren’t put away properly, and then you forget if they weren’t away properly, so you go back to check and oh good they were, but then you aren’t sure you checked so you have to go back and check again, and you can’t leave the house because you have to check again because your family will DIE if this isn’t done right… then you have OCD.
OCD is not a like of organization. OCD is an anxiety disorder, an irrational phobia disorder.
Organizing books by color with no regard for book series is insanity.
It makes perfect sense to people who don’t need to find a book because they don’t actually read.
As I said: insanity
Or people who know what colour their books (so can find them when they need) are and also want their bookshelf to look nice
I don’t understand how sorting just by color alone would look nicer than putting the books in order where the size of the books, color coordination and things like color of the title font are considered as well
It’s personal preference, so it’s entirely arbitrary, right?
Yes
Found the insane person.
Opinion:
I think bookshelves look better when they’re full of books that are clearly being used, rather than a sterile layout that implies those books are nothing more than decor.
My ex-partner had her bookshelf sorted with “perfect disorder”. No two tall books touching, no two red books touching. As chaotic as a bookshelf could possibly be, with a pointed disregard for series or even genres. 100% vibes Based disorganization.
I hated that fucking shelf. I swear it nearly gave me an aneurism trying to find anything on it.
I swear that’s a hard math tesselation problem
I’d guess, it’s a variation of this problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem
At least it had
A E S T H E R I C S
It’s extraordinarily un-OCD. I think that’s the point here. People seem to have forgotten what the D stands for in OCD.
Not being a total slob doesn’t mean you have a disorder.
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it
(I wash my hands so much they bleed)
I had a friend like this. He offered to go to Thailand with me and my daughter for two weeks and it broke him. (Of at least this fixation.)
There is no way to keep up the habit, everything is dirty and it ends up being fine. By the time he got home the impulse just wasn’t there.
I do the same. I told an ex nurse friend that and he said it might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquagenic_urticaria
That appears to be one of the rarest medical conditions on Earth.
I hope you’ll get better.
Not to make light of your situation, but it reads like an OCD version of Slipknot’s Wait and Bleed:
I’ve felt the hate rise up in me
Kneel down and clear the stone of leaves
I wander out where you can’t see
I wash my hands so much they bleedAll good, no worries
Amateur. Try translating that to butt wiping my guy.
My butthole is also effected by my compulsions
:(
I’ve never understood that. I have 2 friends that do that (self reported/needing baby wipes when camping).
Toilet paper is pretty gross, to be fair. A travel bidet and some sphagnum moss will leave the cheeks squeaky clean.
Travel bidet? Omg, I looked it up. They exist, but look to be repurposed enemas.
It’s like a high pressure watergun with a hook. It doesn’t have to go in the out door if you don’t want it to.
sometime i wash my hands so hard my hands would end up being rough and dry, so i had to put moisturizer (ie: bag balm or cetaphil) to make them NOT dry. seriously!
Same
if i had that many books i’d organize them how i organize my clothes. if i pick a book to read, it’s going back at the front when i’m done, so it’s easy to pick it back up for reading later.
this will naturally sort books from most to least read, and then the books i finished or haven’t read will be at the back… eventually, i think.
If I were Santa, Christmas would be 30 days late cause I’d check the list 50 times
This applies to so much. It’s almost always people who have never experienced anything truly hard, no matter if it’s the same category, who do the “omg, that’s so me” thing. Experience of that leads to empathy, sympathy and understanding that someone else’s struggles with something that has never been hard for you can be the main thing that makes their lives difficult.
That’s not an exclusive thing, of course, some people understand that even though they have never had issues on the same level, and some people have had stuff that’s affected them and their lives more bit still don’t get that. But my experience is that those are outlier more than the norm.MY AUTISM IS MORE INTENSE THAN YOUR AUTISM!!!
recently, a group of people that included myself did a random online test for autism
being the only one diagnosed, i won by a pretty big margin
Me: Too autistic to fit in with NTs, not autistic enough to fit in with other autistic people.
