Cleanfreak. Organized. Tidy. Orderly.

People view obsessive-compulsive disorder as a black and white condition. If you clean your room often, you must have OCD. If you like keeping the items on your desk in a certain manner, you must have OCD. If you wear a lot of hand sanitizer, it must be due to your OCD.

Frankly, it is ridiculous to try and describe any mental health issue in just a few blanket statements, and this applies to OCD as well. There are seven defined categories of OCD with further specifications in each category. Not all of them have to do with cleanliness and not all of them are easy to spot in a person, so it is not possible to say that someone washed their hands or cleaned their room because they have OCD. 

From internet star Khloe Kardashian’s comments on “OCD being a blessing” to talk show host Stephen Colbert’s hand washing joke, the discussion of having OCD is wholly mistreated online and in daily conversations. 

The problem with the condition being taken so lightly is it’s hard to change how people view something once they’ve viewed it as something else for so long. People continue to see OCD in a certain way and make inaccurate statements.

The stereotypes of OCD perpetuate misinformation, which is damaging towards those who actually struggle with the condition. Constantly labeling actions as OCD invalidates real signs of OCD. Someone struggling with lesser known effects is not likely to get the help they need because they don’t understand they could possibly have OCD due to misinformation online.

In the past decade, more light has been brought to various mental health conditions and a greater effort has been made to treat them more seriously. Even so, OCD continues to be seen as what a person who loves to clean must have. It is possible that someone who loves cleaning might have OCD, but it’s not always so that every person who cleans frequently must have OCD. 

Perfectionism is not OCD. Though they both may have similar appearances, OCD is an anxiety disorder and driven by a need to get past a certain compulsion or intrusive thought. Perfectionism is driven by high standards and a want to make something happen a certain way. 

OCD is not one thing. Jokes about OCD always gravitate towards “being so OCD,” a statement which warrants an eye roll. It is not possible to condense a condition down to a few things especially when it manifests itself differently in everyone. 

Yes, wanting something to be in a specific order can be a sign of OCD, but it doesn’t have to be. The difference between an action triggered by OCD and a normal behavior is how intrusive it is. People struggling with OCD cannot move past certain compulsions while people without OCD don’t feel like they have to complete the action before moving on. Arranging pencils on a desk can either be a compulsion in a person with OCD or a random habit that someone has, but none of those situations require others to call it “so OCD.”  

To a person struggling with the condition, jokes about it are not helpful. A joke casually made by someone else can not only mock a struggle of another person but also label it wrongfully as a cleaning disorder or a handwashing disorder. These stereotypes only set us back in better understanding different mental health conditions including OCD.

What we should advocate for is raising awareness on conditions like OCD so that they aren’t so commonly joked about in our everyday lives. Doing so can encourage more people to learn about what OCD really is and understand if what they struggle with might be OCD.

Let’s be more sensitive towards how our words can affect someone struggling with conditions, especially when we don’t have any knowledge of the condition other than stereotypes of it online. It is very much possible to make a joke without referencing how OCD it is.

Follow Yaamini (@yjois12) and @CHSCampusNews on Twitter.