My friends and I have encountered many situations where we’ve heard, “Don’t do XYZ like that, it gives me OCD.”
It is extremely sad that disorders of the personality spectrum have been delegitimized since the very inception of the thought that these are disorders. And the problem just grows bigger with OCD, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. It has been an extremely difficult and herculean task for me to explain to my friends that a boy who needs to check his door 22 times just to be sure the door is locked is not equivalent to the disturbance they feel when a KitKat is eaten in a wrong way!
While we all have some obsessions and some compulsions, they often do not equal the challenges of a person with OCD. Generalizing the term not only creates false notions about the disorder but also delegitimizes the problems faced by the actual survivors of the disorder.
I request people stop throwing around terms that easily because you never know, you maybe triggering someone or just making him feel that his fight isn’t worth it.
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