A is for Awareness
We’re all plenty aware of OCD, right? I thought I was. Until I got diagnosed, and I realized I had virtually no idea what OCD really is.
What are your first impressions about OCD, what do you know about it from the media? For me, I thought that a person with OCD was obsessive about being clean and washing their hands. They like to arrange things and line up their markers. I thought these things because that’s what I had seen online and in the media.
So what’s the problem with stereotypes? They can sometimes be true, after all. The problem is that for people who don’t fit the stereotypes, they can have a false impression of what the disorder actually is. I thought there was no way I could have OCD because I’m pretty much the messiest person I know and I don’t obsessively wash my hands. But it turns out…I have severe OCD! Surprise!
It became debilitating in college, and I began looking for answers of what was wrong with me. (I use that phrase because that’s how I felt.) If I had a better idea of what OCD actually was, I could have found an answer sooner and started treatment earlier. My OCD started when I was 6 years old, but I wasn’t diagnosed until I was 19. That’s 13 years time between onset of symptoms and diagnosis. The average is 10 years…and that’s just not okay.
If more people knew what OCD really was, I think more people would seek treatment for it.
So, yeah, awareness. Let’s have some more of that!
(Remember that I am not a therapist, I am just a writer with OCD doing my best.)