 .....It’s probably just the kind of crowd I hang around with, but it seems to me that everyone I know describes themselves as obsessive. Well, everyone except my younger son, that is, a boy who’s very proud of the fact that in a family with a fanatically Type A mom, a totally Type A brother, and a completely reasonable but a bit demanding Type A dad, he – |
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my younger son – doesn’t “obsess” with life, which to be fair is a very accurate assessment of how he does things. This, after all, is a kid who, when he was allowed to pack for himself for a month at our country cabin, forgot to bring along any shirts, and when on another occasion my wife came across a camp packing list he was making on his own, she noted that the list included “hopefully, a sleeping bag.”
.....Anyway, the point I want to make in this article is that lots of us think we’re obsessive and we often describe ourselves that way when we want to brag about our abilities when what we actually mean is that we’re organized or we’re determined or we’re persistent. Being obsessive the way doctors define it as a medical condition is quite another order of magnitude altogether.
.....So let’s start with some definitions, and here we run into a problem because if you try to look up the definition of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) on the net, you realize that in this era when patients |
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prefer to define many health problems for themselves, there are lots of somewhat conflicting definitions out there for OCD.
.....Overall, though, let’s settle for some middle ground and say that OCD refers to a condition in which a person becomes afflicted (really, a prisoner to) a particular obsessive thought pattern or pattern of urges that is recurrent, unwanted, uncontrollable, and disturbing. In most cases, the person who suffers such thoughts and urges becomes compelled to deal with those thoughts or urges with some kind of compulsive behaviour, some sort of ritual or pattern of recurrent actions that are meant to ease those thoughts. So, although a person might suffer from either obsessions or compulsions without the other, most people with OCD suffer from both obsessions and compulsions together.
.....I know this probably sounds very “medicalese” or even confusing to a lot of you, especially those of you who’ve never knowingly encountered someone with OCD, so it’s probably easiest to describe what I mean with an example. |
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