I saw an OCD meme I wanted to share with K the other day. I told
him so, and he automatically responded, “I don’t even want to freaking hear
about it.” He’s so used to shutting people down when they attempt to talk OCD.
I pushed my phone in his face, and his expression softened.
“Well, it’s about damn time that we took the meme world back from
them,” he exclaimed.
He and I see a lot of OCD memes. They ebb and flow on my Facebook
feed every few months, and I’m witnessing an upsurge again. Most of these memes are wrong and slightly
offensive to me just because they are filled with untruths. They are very offensive
to K—who, of course, has all the right in the world to be offended. He feels as
if they invalidate the horrible nature of what he went through and all of the
progress he’s made.
In the past six months, I’ve been appalled to realize how often we
use OCD as an adjective, how often we trivialize it in jokes, how often we pass
off incorrect information about the disorder without even realizing it. My kid
comes home and talks about the kids who—while trying to show compassion and
empathy—discuss how they have OCD some days too, how they are neat freaks, too,
how they think the public bathrooms at school are disgusting too, how they can’t
eat red Skittles, either.
He responds with, “Oh, wow, that’s wild,” and “That must be rough,”
and all the other things one could say when they just want to shut down the
conversation, but in a polite way.
I’ve started calling people on it. I’ve done it nicely (As in, “Hey,
would you consider taking this down? K and I have learned over the last few
months that this is not really OCD, and it can really project the wrong image
of his condition. I don’t want to start a fight, but I do want to start a
discussion, so I’m hoping we could talk about it further.”), but I’ve lost more
than one Facebook friend this way. Often, these people tell me that they have
OCD, too, and that my taking offense is offensive to them. I’ve only had one
who responded in any conversational way.
Why do I call people on it? Well… I’m not their therapist, so I
don’t know what they’ve been diagnosed with, but I don't understand why someone with the disorder would want to post untruths… It's mostly because all I see these days is memes on OCD, and I’ve
never seen a meme for depression or schizophrenia or dissociative disorder, and
I wonder why OCD is fair game.
Why is making fun of OCD fair game? Can anyone explain this to me?
I know I’m sensitive to the issue, but… Can anyone tell me
where the Tumblr blogs making fun of psychosis are? I didn’t think so.
***
K is actually doing really well these days. Not that the obsessions
are gone (the medication does turn down the volume significantly), and not that
the compulsions are completely gone either (the kid is always going to wash his
hands, and he’s always going to let someone else open a door for him if he can),
but K can function. Manage.
Live. My kid can live again.
Back in August, K could not touch a door handle, could not touch a
bathroom floor, could not touch others, could not have his things touched by
others, could not have people in his room, could not touch the bottom of his
shoes, could not look directly at the screen of his phone, could not leave
anything plugged into an electrical outlet, could not leave his room without
repeatedly opening and closing his dresser drawers, could not go to bed without
setting his alarm clock nine times… this is not even a comprehensive list of
what my kid was doing…
Most importantly, in August, K could not eat. My son could not eat.
His food was likely contaminated with deadly bacteria, and it wasn’t the
prospect of his own death that bothered him so much, but the idea that he would
inadvertently pass a deadly disease to his brother that prevented him from
eating. The rituals he performed to keep us all alive and well each day was in
excess of four to five hours each day, and that didn’t even count all of the
things he cleaned or the verbal checking he would do with me each day. The
rituals were a huge problem, but they didn’t even touch the fact that my kid
couldn’t eat. He was hungry. He wanted to eat. But he couldn’t bring himself to
do it, even though he knew the obsessive thoughts were irrational.
My kid has put 15 pounds back on his skinny frame in the past five
months. He can eat again.
So this is the point where I always want to ask exactly how preferring
alphabetical order or avoiding red Skittles is OCD… I understand categorizing
and magical thinking, and the roles they can play in OCD, but having one thing
that you find bothersome does not an OCD diagnosis make.
***
K is to the point in his treatment where exposure-response therapy
is over, and it’s all about relapse prevention. He knows he can do certain
things without getting sick or us dying. He knows the coping skills to manage intrusive
thoughts when they strike. Now we need to learn how to keep it from ever
getting as bad as it was again.
He’s not cured. There is no cure. He will never be ‘normal’. We had
a baseline of manageable behavior we wanted to reach, and for the most part, we’ve
reached it. OCD will always be a specter in the back his mind, waiting to rear
up. It will come back. He will have other episodes. It will be there tomorrow,
and it will be there twenty years from now. The question is, will he be able to
recognize it, mitigate it, and find the help he needs to move past it? That’s
what we’re working on now. And this, by far, is the hardest part.
Part of what he wants to do (and I as well, to be completely
honest) in this relapse prevention segment of treatment is talk to others about
what OCD really is, what it really means, and how debilitating it can be. He
doesn’t know how he wants to go about doing this yet, and I’m not going to push
him. I’ll let him come to his own decisions on how to best approach that.
Still, just the fact that there was an OCD meme on an OCD Tumblr written by
someone who actually has the disorder makes a world of difference, and gives
him something to consider.
If you would
like to check out the Tumblr I mentioned, you can find it here.
