Ailey O’Toole
    Staff Writer

If I were to say “OCD,” what would come to your mind?

Probably your friend who arranges her wardrobe by color, or that guy next to you in class who always has to have two pencils lined up perfectly on his desk, or someone you work with who uses Purell every five minutes during flu season.

OCD, the acronym for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, is usually misappropriated as a synonym for abnormal cleanliness or organization. 

Do you know what OCD actually is?

OCD is having to turn the lights on and off six times every night before you go to bed or 36 times if it is Wednesday. OCD is going back to the door an absurd amount of times to make sure it is locked because “what if someone breaks into my house and burns it down?”

I don’t have OCD so I can’t speak to specifics, but what I can tell you is that feeling uncomfortable when your socks don’t match, or when you wear the underwear that says “Tuesday” on the butt on a Saturday does not mean you have OCD.

It also doesn’t “make” you OCD. You can’t “be” a disorder. That does not make any sense. It is not fair to people who are diagnosed with OCD for you to use a real illness for your actually quite normal tics.

Let’s talk about some disorders that are commonly used as adjectives and clear up what they actually mean.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder has been diminished to represent a type of person who is “beyond orderly,” so to speak, or really, just a neat freak.

However, OCD is a real anxiety disorder in which an individual experiences unwanted and intrusive thoughts (obsessions), often compelling them to repeatedly perform behaviors and routines (compulsions) to temporarily ease their anxiety.

“The comment ‘I’m so OCD’ has unfortunately become synonymous with ‘I’m obsessive’ (I think or worry a lot) or ‘I’m compulsive’ (I like things neat and organized),” Dr. Jeff Szymanski, executive director of the International OCD Foundation said. “During OCD Awareness Week, we try to educate the general public by encouraging people to learn the difference as OCD is in fact a serious psychological disorder that can have a severe impact on people’s daily lives. The ‘D’ in OCD matters.”

In reality, OCD is diagnosed when an individual engages in obsessions and compulsions that take up a significant amount of time each day, usually more than an hour, in a way that interferes with his or her life.

And what most of you probably don’t know is that OCD manifests in many complex ways that often don’t even involve cleanliness (like self-harm or fear) or that may even be messy (like hoarding).

Of course, TV shows and movies are partially responsible for the one-dimensional stereotype of OCD as some persnickety penchant for tidiness.

“Hollywood has created the belief that OCD is just checking, hand washing, or germs,” said Ethan S. Smith, an actor and OCD advocate. “Some characters even use their OCD to their advantage, almost like a skill or superpower, as in the television series ‘Monk.’” And while it is way too easy to find examples of public figures jokingly refer to their “touch of OCD,” others like actress-turned-writer Mara Wilson are speaking out against the trend.

So, if you just love the Container Store and have no authentic feeling of this disorder, it is both insensitive and inaccurate to reference OCD. Some fun words you can use to describe yourself more properly include prickly, fastidious or punctilious.

It seems to me that of the people who don’t take the time to be educated about mental disorders, literally no one knows what schizophrenia actually is.

For years, doctors and mental health advocates have been appealing to the media to stop applying the term “schizophrenic” to politicians, the stock market, weather or sports teams.

In the era of social media, this should apply to all of us; using the term “schizophrenia” to describe any of the above concepts perpetuates a flawed and stigmatizing perception of a very serious illness.

In actuality, schizophrenia is a chronic and severe disorder that interferes with a person’s ability to think clearly, manage emotions, make decisions and relate to others.

There aren’t blanket symptoms that apply to all cases of schizophrenia, but possible symptoms range from delusions and hallucinations to emotional flatness and problems with memory. Next time you find yourself wanting to describe something or someone as schizophrenic, maybe try unstable, nervous, or paranoid.

Over 10 years ago, Harvard Medical School psychiatrists published a report finding that of the 1,740 newspaper articles from 1996 to 1997 including the words schizophrenia, schizophrenic or schizo, a third of them were mentioning the disorder metaphorically.

The authors of the study concluded: “We look forward to the day when prevention and education — not metaphor and demonization — are the dominant messages carried to the public by the news media.”

Unfortunately, though maybe expectedly, not much has change. Dr. Patrick House, a neuroscientist at Stanford, counted that 38 percent of schizophrenia references printed in the New York Times during 2012 were metaphorical.

As House points out, “if Congress was indeed acting schizophrenic, it would have flattened emotions; social withdrawal; and be prone to delusions, hallucinations, paranoia and occasional disordered thought.”

Interestingly, the standards editor at the Times has since issued a note advising against the metaphorical use of schizophrenic, explaining “besides the misconception that it suggests a split personality, using the word lightly or metaphorically can seem insensitive.”

While these examples are the most pervasive, there are many more, from a constantly changing taste in music as ADD to sudden outbursts of tweeting as Tourette’s. 

I can’t even count the amount of times I’ve been on Twitter in the middle of the night and seen people tweeting “The insomnia is real tonight.”

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but just because you can’t sleep one night doesn’t mean you have insomnia. It means you’re human and you’re, well, normal.

“She looks so anorexic.” Really? Are you sure? Some people just have smaller frames, and their natural body size is thin, no matter how many cheeseburgers they eat.

Using names of mental illnesses to hyperbolize harmless idiosyncrasies or common, daily emotions has become pervasive in our cultural dialogue and it needs to stop.

Making these flippant references, like saying, “My day has been so bipolar” because you experienced some normal ups and downs, trivializes how devastating mental illnesses can be and perpetuates misunderstandings about what it really means to suffer from different mental disorders.

When you take a mental illness and use it to superficially describe a behavior or mood that has no relevance to the disorder, you completely belittle the illness. You’re mocking a painful disability, perpetuating stereotypes about these illnesses, and undermining the seriousness of these struggles.

These terms – OCD, bipolar, insomnia – aren’t descriptors. They aren’t jokes.

They are illnesses that are experienced by millions of people around the world.

When you use the term “OCD” as an adjective, you’re not actually talking about the illness itself nor giving any visibility to the people who struggle with the disorder.

You’re just talking about the stereotypical, oversimplified, immature understanding of the word and applying it to something it isn’t.

And what happens when you do this? You make the illness and the struggles of people who actually have the disorder into a joke. You make the lives of people who are hurting meaningless.

These terms should be used in a way that opens up a discussion about these disorders that can interrupt and devastates lives, not used as an adjective in a way that undermines both the gravity of the illness and its impact on real, living people.