Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: Stop Using ‘OCD’ as your Buzz Word
We are living through a pandemic. This is a difficult time for everybody; routines have been disrupted, with key-workers working overtime and putting themselves at risk. We are being urged to wash our hands more frequently and to do that a certain way. Sadly, this has lead to even more misuse of the term, ‘OCD’, in the media. Headlines along the line of, “We need OCD more than ever”, have been published during this pandemic. This is overly simplifying the disorder and does a disservice to those dealing with it. OCD is very complex, and can affect sufferers in many different ways. The media are not wrong about hand-washing being a part of OCD. This is a very common compulsion. However, not everybody with OCD has a compulsion to wash their hands. In our programme on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder , hand-washing is one of the patient’s compulsions. Her hand-washing compulsions are driven by extremely distressing intrusive thoughts about contamination. She is convinced that if ...