preview

Obsessive-compulsive Behaviors Essay

Better Essays

Obsessive-Compulsive Behaviors

"Compulsive" and "obsessive" have become everyday words. "I'm compulsive" is how some people describe their need for neatness, punctuality, and shoes lined up in the closets. "He's so compulsive is shorthand for calling someone uptight, controlling, and not much fun. "She's obsessed with him" is a way of saying your friend is hopelessly lovesick. That is not how these words are used to describe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or OCD, a strange and fascinating sickness of ritual and doubts run wild. OCD can begin suddenly and is usually seen as a problem as soon as it starts.
Compulsives (a term for …show more content…

Senseless thoughts that recur over and over again appearing out of the blue; certain "magical" acts are repeated over and over. For some the thoughts are meaningless like numbers, one number or several, for others they are highly charged ideas-for example, "I have just killed someone." The intrusion into conscious everyday thinking of such intense, repetitive, and to the victim disgusting and alien thoughts is a dramatic and remarkable experience. You can't put them out of your mind, that's the nature of the obsessions.
Some patients are "checkers," they check lights, doors, locks-ten, twenty or a hundred times. Others spend hours producing unimportant symmetry.
Shoelaces must be exactly even, eyebrows identical to eachother. A case studied by the well-known art therapist, Judith Aron Rubin, Rubin tells of a young girl named Mary, who suffers from OCD, and how she drives her fellow waitresses frantic because she goes into a tailspin if the salt and pepper she has arranged in a certain order has been moved around. All of the OCD problems have common themes: you can't trust good judgment, you can't trust your eyes that see no dirt, or really believe that the door is locked. You know you have done nothing harmful but in spite of this good sense you must go on checking and counting.

Get Access