While I finish recovering from Typhoid fever (that’s what it felt like, anyway), I give you this video by Steven A. MacLeod.
Two observations:
1.) The portrayal of an OCD sufferer is accurate.
2.) The kid in this video is mean.
http://youtu.be/HeXTMzP7ijk
I’m admittedly failing to control my worst OCD impulses this morning. I’m trying to assemble a slideshow for my work website and a vital application keeps crashing. It’s a busy day ahead, with blog posts to write and meetings to sit through, so this isn’t the best time for an app to fail me.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:7qSPdNGrKbaqLg6HqflCoZ]
I’ve heard it said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. So for a half hour, I kept trying to restart the work app, getting the same result each time. When I finally slammed the mouse down in anger, making the screen go black for a moment, I realized that I had let my demon get the better of me.
So instead of following my insane impulses, I’m writing this post.
I’d probably be doing better at this had I not started to lose my grip yesterday. The blinders fell over my eyes sometime during the drive home, and I spent the rest of the day operating out of sync from everything around me. I went to bed angry about it and woke up that way. It was a perfect setup for trouble.
I don’t see this as a reversal of all the progress I’ve made in managing my OCD. This morning’s scenario used happen multiple times a day. Now there are much longer spaces between the bad episodes.
But when I have a bad episode, I have to be real about it.
I’ve said it before: OCD is a two-faced bitch. Some days it gives me the boost I need to get a lot done. I came into the office this morning expecting that flavor of OCD to show up and power me through slideshow-, blogging- and newsletter-making before 10 am, when I have two meetings in a row. Instead, the wrong OCD showed up.
It happens. I’m moving on and will do the best I can with this day. Chances are that it’ll turn out to be a pretty good day.
Time to try making it happen.
Here we are at the end of OCD Awareness week and I’m only now remembering to write about it. I guess you could say my ADD ran over my OCD.
Obviously, OCD awareness is the central mission of this blog. But it’s better for me to observe this week by leading you to others who are fighting the good fight. We recently set up a resource page for that purpose.
Please take some time and check it out. These are truly excellent resources I’m thankful to have.
The Facebook page of George Takei — Mr. Sulu from the original Star Trek series and subsequent movies — has become one of my favorites. The actor has made a second career for himself on there, plastering his page with some of the funniest photos/memes I’ve seen.
Today, I noticed one such meme that pokes fun at OCD:
I didn’t think much of it at first. I see all kinds of OCD-based humor on the Internet every day, and this meme struck me as typical. I was more amused with Takei’s comment: “This strikes a cord with me.”
Then I remembered a post I recently wrote about how OCD humor cuts both ways. [See: Is Humor Reinforcing The OCD Stigma?] It occurred to me that this meme straddled that shaky, hard-to-see line that separates the funny from the offensive. To most people it’s a quick chuckle before moving on to something else. But to someone suffering from the disorder, it’s going to hurt. I can laugh now, but I assure you I wouldn’t have been laughing had I seen this eight or so years ago, when OCD had driven me to the brink of a physical and emotional breakdown.
I’m not the only one who did a double take on this meme. The International OCD Foundation sent Takei the following comment, which is also posted on its Facebook page:
Yesterday’s OCD pun was well-meaning, but missed the mark. Even if someone is obsessive or compulsive, that doesn’t mean they have OCD. Trivializing the term just makes it harder for those who do have OCD to get help. Like most mental health issues, stigma and lack of awareness are the biggest obstacles to getting treatment. You are such a great advocate for many causes, I hope you will consider joining ours.
I think that was the right response. I also think it’s a message the actor will take to heart. He strikes me as a good man who works hard to keep the hurtful humor off his page.
In fact, when he sees this, I won’t be surprised if his reaction is a mortified version of his trademark “Oh Myyyyyy.”
I got an interesting response to some older posts about OCD gag gifts — particularly one about OCD hand sanitizer. The reader was worried these gifts and other brands of OCD humor would only reinforce the stigma monster that keeps people like us in the shadows.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:2TJRQj7XJvGBY4ZzIue2ei]
Here’s the comment, from Arthur Lawrence:
I can laugh at it, and so can you. We both have OCD. And laughing at the OCD “monster” does indeed weaken it. This is a therapeutic application. What bothers me are the millions who have no idea what OCD really is.
For them, products like this continue to trivialize OCD and help keep those millions uninformed about this disease.
Should we now have “Tourette itch powder”? It would be about as appropriate as this product. Again, I don’t dispute what you say about laughing at one’s own “mental defects.” But I do know that OCD research and treatment are still in the dark ages, relatively speaking. And products like this, out in the general public, aren’t going to get people to believe that OCD can be as debilitating as cancer. It needs to be taken as seriously as cancer.
Mocking it will almost certainly not help that to happen.
Arthur makes an important point.
I still firmly believe that humor is an important coping tool for someone learning to manage depressive mental disorders. Abraham Lincoln, a chronically depressed man for much of his adult life, relied on it during the darkest days of the Civil War. He reveled in telling jokes and amusing stories. It helped get him through the pain, long before antidepressants were created.
But the stigma around OCD is still alive and well. I see people all the time talking about “their OCD” when they’re really talking about their Type-A personalities. That doesn’t bother me much, but I know other OCD cases that get wounded by such talk. OCD behavior is still the stuff of ridicule and belittling. People will still make fun of a person’s quirks, which embarrasses and hurts that person when they inevitably find out they’re being made fun of.
Would people find the gags funny if they were about cancer or Tourettes? The truth is that we think differently about physical diseases than mental diseases. We understand the ramifications of physical diseases better and they’re more socially acceptable in that regard. And when a physical disease is a lethal one, we have much less tolerance for jokes about it. Yet people will make jokes about all manner of things for all kinds of reasons.
In the final analysis, I think most health issues need to be addressed with a combination of sober education and humor. People need to know the suffering real OCD brings about, just as people need to know the anguish a cancer patient experiences.
But we need to laugh at our conditions once in a while, too, because the laughter makes the disease appear smaller, even if it’s only for a few moments.
I’ve always avoided all those Facebook games, but I recently decided to give Scrabble a shot. I’m a professional wordsmith, so I figured what the hell. I can kick a few asses and feel good about my word wizardry. But I’m the one getting my ass kicked, in more ways than one.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:0N7yGNvc6Oy2bAb4gM8euG]
I have six games going and I’m getting beat to shit in all but one of them. I have my excuses, for sure. I keep getting stuck with letters I can’t work with. I also question the sanity of those who decided what qualifies as a legitimate word. Most proper nouns are rejected, but the random name will make it through. I see my opponents getting by with a lot of abbreviated words, but I can’t catch a break. Asshat isn’t a legitimate word in the Scrabble dictionary. I cry bullshit. Also, who decided oi is a word?
Here’s the real problem, though: The game triggers the part of my OCD that can’t leave well enough alone. If someone sends me a Scrabble request, I have to respond immediately. No saving my turn for later. I’ve discovered that two of my opponents have the same problem. Two seconds after I make my move, there’s another Scrabble request from the person I just made a move against. Making matters worse, they’re good. Too good. They drop 78-point words on the board like it’s nothing. Bastards.
I’ll keep playing for a little while longer, but then I think I’ll have to delete the Scrabble app forever. It’s too big a trigger for me.
If I were winning more often, I’d no doubt feel differently. But then I’d probably become even more compulsive about the game.
That being the case, losing is probably a winning strategy for me.
An article in The Atlantic called “5 Very Specific Ways to Fix Your OCD” blows it from the start — in the headline.
OCD sufferers know damn well that you can’t fix OCD. You can only learn to manage it and make it less of a disrupting force in your life.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:74gJqWYjsfTyG4tSjhkoh7]
Knowing that as I do, I’m dissapointed that the writer would give OCD sufferers false hope, followed by five pieces of advice that are not totally unhelpful, but also not very realistic.
I still write some clunkers with the best of ’em. All writers do, especially when you produce articles daily. But here, I think the author was mislead by Concordia University psychologist Adam Radomsky, who spelled out the five strategies.
What follows are portions of the article in italics and my responses in plain text.
Re-examine your responsibility. Many of the symptoms of OCD can be caused and/or exacerbated by increases in perceived responsibility. The more responsible you feel, the more you are likely to check, wash, and/or think your thoughts are especially important. Ask yourself how responsible you feel for the parts of your life associated with your OCD, then take a step back from the problem and write down all of the possible other causes. For example, someone who would likely check their appliances repeatedly might feel completely responsible to protect their family from a fire. If this person adopted a broader perspective, they would realize that other family members, neighbors, the weather, the electrician who installed the wiring in the home, the company that built the appliances, and others should actually share in the responsibility.
Radomsky misses the point — OCD sufferers usually know the reality of these situations. But our minds spin with worry anyway. Like the addict who knows he-she will eventually die from their bad habits but can’t help but continue with them anyway, the OCD sufferer knows that he-she shares responsibilities with others, but can’t help but take on all the problems of the world anyway. The brain is constantly in motion, taking small concerns and sculpting them into huge, paralyzing worries.
Repetitions make you less sure about what you’ve done. This is bizarre because we usually check and/or ask questions repeatedly to be more confident of what we’ve done. OCD researchers in the Netherlands and Canada, however, have found that when repetition increases, this usually backfires and may lead to very dramatic declines in our confidence in our memory. To fix this, try conducting an experiment. On one day, force yourself to restrict your repetition to just one time. Later that day, on a scale of 0-10, rate how confident you are in your memory of what you’ve done. The next day, repeat the same behavior but rate it a few more times throughout the day. Most people who try this experiment find later that their urges to engage in compulsive behavior decline because they learn that the more they repeat something, the less sure they become.
I appreciate what he’s trying to do here with the role-playing game, and it can be helpful to try tracking how much you repeat an action and what it does to your memory.
But he again misses the crucial point: We OCD sufferers already know these repeated actions fuck with the memory of what we have or haven’t done. One of my OCD habits has always been going over the checklist for what I need to do before leaving for work the next morning. Clothes laid out? Check. Coffee maker programmed? Check. Lunch made and in the fridge? Check. Laptop bag stuffed with all the necessary work tools? Check. Then, even though I know full well what I’ve just done, I run through that same check list over and over. I’m not as bad as I was before treatment, but it’s still in me.
Treat your thoughts as just that — thoughts. Intrusive thoughts are normal, but they become obsessions when people give them too much importance … Spend a week making this distinction between your OCD thoughts (noise) and thoughts associated with things you are actually doing or would like to be doing (signal). See what happens.
I’ll tell you what happens: Your thoughts continue to run wild despite the exercise. Not that you shouldn’t try it. For a few people, it may help. But one of the very first things we learn is that we are not our thoughts; that thoughts and reality are not the same thing. But this is like the responsibility example above. We keep thinking because we can’t help it.
Practice strategic disclosure. People with OCD fear that if or when they disclose their unwanted intrusive thoughts or compulsions, other people will judge them as harshly as they judge themselves. This sadly often leaves the individual suffering alone without knowing that more than nine in 10 people regularly experience unwanted, upsetting thoughts, images, and impulses related to OCD themes as well. Consider letting someone in your life who has been supportive during difficult times know about the thoughts and actions you’ve been struggling with. Let them know how upset you are with these and how they’re inconsistent with what you want in life. You might be pleasantly surprised by their response. If not, give it one more try with someone else. We’ve found that it never takes more than two tries.
This piece of advice is sound, but gets buried beneath the unhelpful material.
Observe your behavior and how it lines up with your character. Most people struggling with OCD either view themselves as mad, bad and/or dangerous or they fear that they will become such, so they often go to great lengths to prevent bad things from happening to themselves or to their loved ones. But ask yourself how an observer might judge your values based on your actions. If you spend hours each day trying to protect the people you love, are you really a bad person? If you exert incredible amounts of time and effort to show how much you care, how faithful you are, how you just want others to be safe and happy, maybe you’re not so bad or dangerous after all. And as for being crazy, there’s nothing senseless about OCD. People sometimes fail to understand how rational and logical obsessions and compulsions can be. Remember, your values and behavior are the best reflection of who you are, not those pesky unwanted noisy thoughts.
This too is sound advice. But it leaves out something incredibly important: You can’t review your character and reconcile it with your OCD habits in this simple step he lays out. It takes years of intense therapy — and for some, like me, the added help of medication — to peel away the layers and get at the root of your obsessions.
You can learn to manage OCD and live a good life. But it’s a lot of hard, frustrating work. And that work is ALWAYS there, until the day you die.
Know that before you dive into the search for simple solutions. If it looks simple, it’s probably too good to be true.
I’m standing at a bar in Boston with my wife and stepmom. They order wine and I order coffee. My stepmom beams and says something about how awesome it is that I beat my demons.
I appreciate the pride and the sentiment. But it’s also dangerous when someone tells a recovering addict that they’ve pulled the monkey off their back for good.
Mood music:
Here’s the thing about that monkey: You can smack him around, bloody him up and knock him out. But that little fucker is like Michael Myers from the Halloween movies. He won’t die.
Sometimes you can keep him knocked out for a long time, even years. But he always wakes up, ready to kick your ass right back to the compulsive habits that nearly destroyed you before.
That may sound a little dramatic. But it’s the truth, and recovering addicts can never be reminded of this enough.
Dr. Drew had a good segment on the subject last year, when he interviewed Nikki Sixx:
Sixx talked about his addictions and how he always has to be on guard. Dr. Drew followed that up with a line that rings so true: “Your disease is doing push ups right now.”
So painfully true.
I know that as a binge-eating addict following the 12 Steps of Recovery, I can relapse any second. That’s why I have to work my program every day.
But Sixx makes another point I can relate to: Even though he’s been sober for so many years, he still gets absorbed in addictive behavior all the time. The difference is that he gives in to the addiction of being creative. He’s just released his second book and second album with Sixx A.M. Motley Crue still tours and makes new music. He has four kids, a clothing line and so on. He’s always doing something.
I get the same way with my writing. That’s why I write something every day, whether it’s here or for the day job. I’m like a shark, either swimming or drowning. By extension, though I’ve learned to manage the most destructive elements of my OCD,I still let it run a little hot at times — sometimes on purpose. If it fuels creativity and what I create is useful to a few people, it’s worth it.
The danger is that I’ll slip my foot off the middle speed and let the creative urge overshadow things that are more important. I still fall prey to that habit.
And though it’s been well over three years since my last extended binge, my sobriety and abstinence has not been perfect. There have been times where I’ve gotten sloppy, realized it, and pulled back.
But the occasional sloppiness and full-on relapse will always be separated by a paper-thin wall.
I’ll have to keep aware of that until the day I die.
The monkey isn’t going anywhere. My job is to keep him tame most of the time.
There’s a saying on Facebook that depression isn’t a sign of weakness, but simply the result of being strong for too long. Somewhat true — though weakness does feed the beast.
Mood music:
I’m feeling it this morning.
I’ve always taken a certain level of satisfaction from my ability to stay standing in the face of death, illness, family dysfunction, depression and addiction. Sometimes, I get an over-inflated sense of survivor’s pride.
People love to tell you how awesome you are when you emerge from adversity stronger than before. The victor is placed on a 10-foot pedestal and life looks hunky-dory from up there. But it’s only a matter of time before the person on top loses balance and crashes to the ground.
I’ve fallen from that pedestal a bunch of times, and my ass is really starting to hurt from all those slips off the edge.
All this has me asking the question: How much can you blame depression on being strong too long when many times it comes back because the victim has been weak?
I don’t think there’s a precise answer. I only know this: I feel like I’ve been trying like a motherfucker to be strong 24-7. But I don’t seem to have the fortitude to maintain it, and I give in to weakness.
In the past, that weakness would involve indulging in food, alcohol and tobacco until I was too sick to function.
Today, the weakness involves getting angry and self-defensive and distant at the drop of a hat.
For all the progress I’ve made in managing my OCD, there are still moments where I go weak, put the blinders on and do some stupid things.
It’s the compulsion to keep staring at the laptop screen when one or both kids need me to look up and give them some attention.
It’s stopping in the middle of a conversation with my wife because the cellphone is ringing or someone has pinged me online.
It’s spending too much money on food and entertainment for the kids because it’s easier to me at the time than cooking the food myself and playing a board game with them instead.
I’ve been working double-time at bringing my compulsive tendencies to heel, going through some intensified therapy. The short-term result is that I’m an angrier person than I normally am.
My therapist made note of that anger at our last meeting. The trigger in the room was him taking me back to my younger years in search of clues to present-day debacles. I thought I was done with sessions like that five years ago.
But I’m learning that the road to mental wellness is not linear. It goes in a circle. It’s like driving to the same place every day for work. The drive to work and back is a loop of the same landmarks, the same traffic patterns and the same behind-the-wheel thinking sessions.
I’m learning that managing my issues is going to involve frequent trips back and forth from the past to the present. This pisses me off. But I know I have to keep at it.
I guess I’ll always have my weak moments because of the events that shaped me. But you can still be strong throughout it, learning to regain your footing more quickly and being better at the kind of discussion with loved ones that prevents endless miscommunication from adding up to a mountain of pain.
I don’t know when I’ll truly reach that level of strength. But for now I’m leaning hard on all my coping tools, including the music and the praying.
In a dysfunctional family few are without blame for the things that go wrong. But there’s one criticism I’ve heard time and again that makes me bristle:
“You never call.”
Mood music:
It’s not just that I don’t call the person who says that. It’s that I don’t call a lot of people. I’ve never been a fan of the phone. I always feel awkward on the phone, especially when there are pockets of dead air. I feel pressure to keep the conversation going, and it all goes downhill from there.
Thanks to modern technology, I touch base with family more than I ever did before. I do it with Android texts. I do it with Facebook. To a lesser extent, I do it with email.
But sometimes the folks I’m reaching out to don’t return fire.
I tried using Facebook to communicate more with my mother, but she unfriended me. She found this blog and it pissed her off.
I tried using it to connect with an aunt I haven’t talked to in awhile. She blocked me.
I’d chalk it up to these people not being ready for Internet communications, except that they do it fine with everyone else.
I figure if I phoned, the reception would be about as icy. But like I said, the phone makes me feel awkward. Ironic, since I’ve made my living at journalism for 18 years.
But here’s the meat of the problem:
I’ve had people bitch that I don’t call this relative or that relative to check on them and let them know I care. But the very people I’m scolded for not calling don’t call me, either.
When my relationship with my mother imploded five and a half years ago, a few family members were left confused and angry that me, Erin and the kids had disappeared from family birthday parties and the like.
They talked about it to a lot of people. But no one ever called me for my side of the story. They just made assumptions.
That’s why, when someone tries to make me feel guilty by telling me I never call people, my first impulse is shrug and roll my eyes. Trying to guilt me is bad enough. Do it with hypocrisy and you’re even more certain not to get the response you want from me.
You’re probably reading this and thinking, “Man, he’s bitter today. That’s not like him.” I guess I am a little bit bitter.
But I broach the issue because mine isn’t a special case. Most of us get slapped with the “you never call” guilt trip from family members.
This is the kind of guilt tactic that doesn’t work. If a person isn’t inclined to use the phone much, they’re not going to change their ways. And, if you’re on Facebook and they’re on Facebook but they don’t use it back when you reach out, that’s about the same as never calling.
That said, I do want better relations with my extended family. When a family member sends me a friend request on Facebook, I’ll never turn them down. I want to use the medium to reconnect with them.
My phone line is always open, too. Those who really want to get in touch with me there know how to get the number.
I don’t believe there’s ever a point of no return when it comes to ending family estrangements. I remain willing.
But if someone chooses not to get in touch with me, they shouldn’t expect me to care when I hear they’ve been whining about me from second- and third-hand sources.
