I have a lot of pet peeves, but one that gets my blood boiling every time is when people make light of OCD. It’s such a stigmatized disorder, and it’s commonplace for people to make jokes about it. If we’re ever represented on TV, it’s a running gag about how much of a neat freak we are (which isn’t even true for a lot of people with OCD). We get told by our families were just overreacting or that “everyone is a little OCD sometimes”.

We go through day after day of people purposefully triggering us to see how OCD works or just to watch us get uncomfortable. It’s like a game to them. Even friends would give into the temptation to skew a paper or leaving something over the edge oft he table, just to see me reflexively adjust it. They would take it a step forward, holding the skewed object in place. After they’d watched me squirm sufficiently enough, then they let me fix it. It was all in “good fun”.

Although I’ve improved greatly thanks to much time and a skilled therapist, I still have symptoms of the disorder and fall victim to it. It’s not easy to overcome. It’s hell.

Want to know why?

The best way to treat OCD is exposures. That means the therapist will put us in a controlled situation, and expose us to our trigger. We must then sit there and let my anxiety rise, let me cry and panic, until I come back down from the panic and am calm again. This can take ten minutes, this can take forty minutes. The first time I did an exposure, it took almost an hour. It was the longest hour of my life.

The situations and things that trigger OCD are not funny. They’re not a game. They’re not a joke.

OCD is not a joke.