Life with OCD
Sep. 19th, 2012 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neadodsAs I'm obsessively doing something over and over because I can't get closure (but WHY is iTunes 10.7 not even attempting to download on either of two computers? Why, after 4 attempts, can I not even get the email to allow me to change my password?), it seemed a good time to talk about OCD. Especially with this post hitting Al Stefanelli's blog today.
Now, I'm damned lucky here. I have OCD enough to notice -- but only if you're close to me IRL, and certainly not enough to actually suffer. A lot of the anxiety can be short-circuted by a second party ("Yes, you did lock the door. I saw you.") and the rituals are few and short. I can and have actually deliberately thought out and programmed a couple of rituals into my habits. I have nothing to complain about, really. But I can see "bad off" from where I stand, especially as being tired or being particularly stressed sends me right down the rabbit hole.
I don't like that OCD is almost always played for laughs on TV. Eureka had a throwaway joke about a guy rattling his door precisely three times as he left, and my only thought was "if that's what works for him, WHO CARES?" Monk just about makes me froth at the mouth. The first half of the first season was fairly decent, because they were portraying him in a tailspin out of grief, fighting to overcome his OCD so he could go back to the job he loved. Then it slowly became more and more of a joke that he felt no need to change and everyone around him just had to put up with -- to the point that the character had a psychotic break, (simultaneously and inadvertently coming up with a method of remaining vaguely sane in a very stressful situation)... and nobody even though to even mention this to him. Oh, and it turns out that he was always more than a little strange and came from a whole family of weirdos, ha ha ha.
NOT.
Glee handled it better, and that's not really a sentence I ever expected to type. They were still playing it for laughs, but you knew why Emma had her issues, saw her struggle with both anxiety and the knowledge that she was pushing away the people trying to help her, and saw her fight and try and relapse and fight again.
My favorite OCD character, hands down, is DI Chandler from Whitechapel for a variety of reasons. He's not the punchline of the joke; he's a guy who's fucked up on a number of levels, of which the OCD is only one. He knows perfectly well that he has a problem, and sometimes we've seen that problem overwhelm him. (The scene where he was flipping the light on and off over and over, then tried to walk away? OMG, I've made that noise myself when I turn back. That. Very. Noise.) But at the same time, he's functional and not just at the "able to deal with the world only with the heavy help of an assistant" way. He's responsible for himself (although his Sargent is now starting to mother him), made it a fair way up the career ladder, and has a variety of coping mechanisms. Socially acceptable, non-damaging coping mechanisms, yet.
I wish there were more characters like him.
Now, I'm damned lucky here. I have OCD enough to notice -- but only if you're close to me IRL, and certainly not enough to actually suffer. A lot of the anxiety can be short-circuted by a second party ("Yes, you did lock the door. I saw you.") and the rituals are few and short. I can and have actually deliberately thought out and programmed a couple of rituals into my habits. I have nothing to complain about, really. But I can see "bad off" from where I stand, especially as being tired or being particularly stressed sends me right down the rabbit hole.
I don't like that OCD is almost always played for laughs on TV. Eureka had a throwaway joke about a guy rattling his door precisely three times as he left, and my only thought was "if that's what works for him, WHO CARES?" Monk just about makes me froth at the mouth. The first half of the first season was fairly decent, because they were portraying him in a tailspin out of grief, fighting to overcome his OCD so he could go back to the job he loved. Then it slowly became more and more of a joke that he felt no need to change and everyone around him just had to put up with -- to the point that the character had a psychotic break, (simultaneously and inadvertently coming up with a method of remaining vaguely sane in a very stressful situation)... and nobody even though to even mention this to him. Oh, and it turns out that he was always more than a little strange and came from a whole family of weirdos, ha ha ha.
NOT.
Glee handled it better, and that's not really a sentence I ever expected to type. They were still playing it for laughs, but you knew why Emma had her issues, saw her struggle with both anxiety and the knowledge that she was pushing away the people trying to help her, and saw her fight and try and relapse and fight again.
My favorite OCD character, hands down, is DI Chandler from Whitechapel for a variety of reasons. He's not the punchline of the joke; he's a guy who's fucked up on a number of levels, of which the OCD is only one. He knows perfectly well that he has a problem, and sometimes we've seen that problem overwhelm him. (The scene where he was flipping the light on and off over and over, then tried to walk away? OMG, I've made that noise myself when I turn back. That. Very. Noise.) But at the same time, he's functional and not just at the "able to deal with the world only with the heavy help of an assistant" way. He's responsible for himself (although his Sargent is now starting to mother him), made it a fair way up the career ladder, and has a variety of coping mechanisms. Socially acceptable, non-damaging coping mechanisms, yet.
I wish there were more characters like him.
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