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 she gets peanuts on her hands, and it gets into her mouth, she might die. This would be rational for somebody with a severe nut allergy. However, she has no allergy to nuts. She knows this, but her intrusive thoughts still lead her to become anxious at the thought of a reaction to the peanuts. The skin on her hand is very dry and raw from washing her hands multiple times.

The rituals do not stop at hand-washing. She speaks about having to wash her hands a certain number of times, being very particular about the number 4 not being an option. She explains that the number 4 is her boyfriend’s favourite number, and she worries if she washes her hands 4 times, she might accidentally think about him and have horrible thoughts. She is afraid of having intrusive thoughts that are violent or out of character, because it makes her doubt herself as a person.

The above explanation of the patient’s experience with OCD highlights that OCD is not something that anybody ‘needs’. It caused her a significant amount of distress, and stopped her from being able to do simple things like bath and eat.

Yes, we need to wash our hands to help stop the spread of COVID-19. But we do not need to have OCD to be able to wash our hands.