High school student from The Hockaday School in Dallas writes about dealing with OCD and how damaging it is for teenagers to deal with stereotypes and jocking...
We need to stop using OCD as a substitute for words like “crazy” and “psychotic,” along with correcting people when they use harmful statements, writes Georgia La Grone.by Jamaica Kincaid in my sophomore year, several classmates described the main character’s behavior as “psychotic” and “deranged.” I was left with the impression that some of my classmates would have me strapped in a straitjacket and thrown into a padded room.
One of my peers thought that the most fitting explanation for Annie John’s maniacal personality was that she suffered from OCD, and if that student wrote the ending of the book, she would have had her — a 12-year-old at that point in the novel — locked away in a psych ward. Although not many people in that room knew that I had OCD, I never expected every person in the class to erupt with laughter at such a rude remark, treating this condition with such levity.
Anyone without OCD can’t understand how it disrupts my life, especially despite medication, it never fully goes away. After bouncing between Prozac, Zoloft and Lexapro, I know that no matter how strongly medication quiets down the constant, blaring alarm in my brain, that red siren will never be silenced, due to my genetic makeup.Seeing a fundamental part of myself twisted into the butt of my peers’ bad jokes, I not only question my sanity but who I am as a person.
We need to stop using OCD as a substitute for words like “crazy” and “psychotic,” along with correcting people when they use harmful statements such as, “I’m so OCD, I go crazy when my room isn’t clean.”The more we use actual diagnoses as lazy attempts at humor, the more we root harmful stereotypes in generally accepted truth. In the same illogical way that you wouldn’t trivialize fatigue by saying, “I totally have cancer,” don’t say that your typical stress is OCD.
Clean up these common colloquial references of OCD and consider the impact words have when we choose to get a quick laugh out of our friends. If you want to upgrade your vocabulary, describe your cleanliness habits as “outrageous” or “ludicrous,” not as a serious illness that someone affected by it is likely to hear.
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