OCD and It's Misuses!

Stigma surrounding OCD is increasingly dangerous for people suffering from it. Misuses of OCD can be seen in movies, TV shows, even the news. People that have to deal with obsessive compulsive disorder on a daily basis are exhausted enough from the mental torture as it is. The way that the media presents it just makes sufferers feel even worse. As many people are aware of, Khloe Kardashian is known for her need to be extremely organised. However in 2018, she started a series of videos in which she named under the title, ‘KHLOCD.’ Khloe likes arranging cookies perfectly in jars and additionally has a very organised fridge. Apparently this means she has ‘KHLOCD.’ Simply the debilitating mental illness but with her name slotted in. She posted videos that involved her organising a cookie jar and tidying up her kitchen. When she mentioned her ‘KHLOCD’ in the video, she received backlash, both on her twitter and the comments section on her YouTube videos. She was also contacted by many charities and organisations that what she was doing was extremely harmful to the OCD community. Regardless of this, she continued to post more videos on the subject of ‘KHLOCD’ instead of taking them down and simply just turned off the comments section under her videos so people were unable to review. Furthermore, on an episode of, ‘Keeping Up With The Kardashians,’ she visited a therapist who specialised in OCD to talk about her obsessive cleaning which is odd considering it’s something she clearly enjoys. She claims, ‘I have been KHLOCD and I have Kris Jenner to thank.’ First of all she uses the word ‘been’ instead of ‘had’ which is grammatically incorrect and shows that she is in fact stigmatising the disorder further. Second of all, by ‘thanking’ her mother, it is clear that she enjoys the organisation and the cleanliness and her life isn’t affected in a bad way from it. Being an extremely popular celebrity, she has gone on to increasingly stigmatise many people’s interpretation of the illness, making it a lot harder for the OCD community to be understood and taken seriously. Shows like Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners and Hoarders reinforce stereotypes about OCD and characters like Sheldon Cooper in the Big Bang Theory are treated as a laughing stock for their illness. This kind of stigma that is being rapidly spread does nothing but ignore the OCD community. This results in making recovery harder or letting people who have OCD but are unsure about it continue to suffer in silence. You will find that through media narratives, all we do is clean. We are perfectionists and we are crazily organised. There is a massive difference in perfectionism and OCD. Do your research. Look at reliable websites that give you true information. Representation of mental illness must come from the people who have truly been through it and know for a fact what they are talking about. It's high time that people people become more aware of OCD and educate others on how often representation from the media is utterly false!