Being Orderly Is Not OCD

Lately, on social media and other internet outlets, there’s been a surge of content related to people with various mental health conditions feeling slighted about the casual use of clinical terms to describe non-clinical behaviors and states of mind. When people describe their tendency to be neat and orderly as “their OCD” or declare that the recent film that moved them to tears made them “depressed,” it’s understandable that those who struggle with these conditions might feel somewhat trivialized when these terms are invoked to describe mild and everyday emotions. Those who identify as neurodivergent can also object to expressions like “my ADHD” being used every time someone who doesn’t actually meet criteria for the diagnosis gets distracted or forgets where they put their keys.

What complicates this situation, however, is that, at this point, there is really quite good evidence that most if not all of these diagnoses really do exist on a broad spectrum just like many other things like height, IQ, and blood pressure. While frameworks like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) force people to reduce this spectrum into more binary terms of having or not having a particular diagnosis, it is abundantly clear that the brain doesn’t work this way. Even the DSM admits this in its opening section.

So how do we square the legitimate request to avoid using clinical terms for non-clinical behaviors while still acknowledging the realities of how the brain actually works? It actually may not be that difficult. Looking at many non-mental health areas, there are a lot of examples. We all have a blood pressure, for example, but you have to exceed a certain threshold before you are “hypertensive.” We all have a height, but not everyone is “tall.”

In this way, we might be able to train ourselves to use different words when referring to thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that really fall in the more typical range while reserving more clinical terms for actual clinical situations. We can say that a particular experience made us feel “down” rather than “depressed.” An odd idea could be described as “weird” rather than “psychotic.”

Of course, there will be those who dismiss this whole effort as wokeness or being politically correct. There will also be those who won’t want to acknowledge, for example, that autistic spectrum disorders really exist on a spectrum. For most of us, however, there is room to honor both the realities of science and the dignity of people who struggle with full-fledged mental health conditions.