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5 Things Not to Say to People with OCD


  When you have obsessive compulsive disorder, or love someone that does, you know a whole lot more about how little people really know about OCD. You know that it's about a whole lot more than cleaning, and the jokes about being "so OCD" actually, aren't really that funny. 

OCD is hard to really understand, even for people with the illness. But knowing what not to say to someone with OCD is a great place to start helping. 

  1. "Everyone's a little OCD, really"
A lot of people have weirdly specific behaviours and their own way of doing something, but this doesn't mean they have OCD. OCD is made up of intrusive thoughts that cause a huge amount of anxiety to the sufferer, which drives them to carry out their rituals. Whether it's cleaning, seeking reassurance, or any other type of ritual, it is exhausting and miserable. The majority of people don't have OCD, but saying these things invalidate the people that do have to live with it. 

  1. "Your house must be so clean"
It's a common misconception, but also very wrong and frustrating. There are so many more forms that cause endless numbers of exhausting rituals, but people only ever really see obsessive cleaning as "real OCD". Millions of people with OCD carry out rituals an endless number of times, every single day, but unless it's cleaning, it stays invisible. People with OCD that are driven to obsessively clean by their intrusive thoughts don't enjoy it, either. 

  1. "You must love cleaning, then"
Like I said, people with OCD don't enjoy being forced by terrifying intrusive thoughts to carry out rituals. Think of it like this-if someone followed you around all day, everyday, threatening to do something you'd never want to happen if you didn't repeatedly do something you didn't want to do (e.g clean the bathroom sink twice an hour or touch everything you walked past 24 times) would you enjoy it? Didn't think so. 

  1. "Why don't you just stop doing the rituals?"
I'll say it over and over, nobody enjoys doing rituals. Spending hours and hours of every single day carrying out the same repeated actions is exhausting and frustrating, but if not doing the rituals didn't make me so anxious I felt like my heart would explode, whilst I'm screaming at a therapist that I have to do my rituals, I'd never do it again. Nobody would if it was easy to stop. 

  1. "Stop worrying about that, it's stupid"
It's hard enough to be tortured by intrusive thoughts all day everyday. Most people with OCD understand that their worries are irrational, or that their rituals don't control the likelihood of things, but it's a mental illness. The problem is in our brain chemistry, it's not a choice. We understand that our anxieties may sound stupid, or be hard to understand, but it's a mental illness and can't just be stopped. 




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