When it comes to media – be it newspapers, television shows, films or books – OCD gets around, and I don’t think it’s always a case of any publicity is good publicity…
A huge amount of the time the character shows a form of mild and stereotypical OCD – whether it be washing their hands for all of two minutes, showing a propensity for neatness or, an old favourite, turning a light switch on and off a couple of times, we rarely get a chance to see the darker side of OCD. It’s important to note that one of the diagnostic criteria for OCD is that it takes up at least an hour of your day – it’s not a little quirk that takes all of thirty seconds and causes no anxiety.
I get that it’s not easy for the public to grasp that the young father who has sexual intrusive thoughts about his daughter is not a paedophile, that the child who is worried about killing his family is not a murderer in the making, but surely by representing the illness fairly, with the nasty bits left in, the understanding will come.
There are some good examples out there, it’s not all bad, but the majority show OCD as a funny, ridiculous twist to a comic character, or make a brief attempt at fleshing out the back story of the protagonist or a minor character.
So this is my new series – finding representations of OCD in the media and taking a closer look….
Have you ever listened to "Obsession" by Sky Ferreira? A line of the song goes:
ReplyDelete"Ain't nothing wrong with OCD
Long as it's for me, long as it's for me"
I bet she doesn't even know what OCD is.
Emma xxxx
Yeah, I notice that OCD is often portrayed as funny or amusing, whereas in reality it sucks up huge amounts of time and energy.
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