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What is OCD?

We put the following question to counseling psychologist and OCD therapist Leslie Shoemaker: “When somebody asks, what is OCD, what do you say?”

“It’s complex,” she said. “But I’ll stick to a really simple, broad definition. OCD stands for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. We define ‘obsessions’ as intrusive thoughts, so it could be a thought like, ‘if I don’t wash my hands, something bad is going to happen.’ It could be an intrusive image, where you see something terrible happening to somebody you care about. The compulsion bit is the action that people take to make the thought go away.”

“Hand washing, for example. Checking light switches, stoves, locks. And then there are inward types, where it could be praying, it could be counting, it could even just be thinking the same thought over and over and over again. Or even questioning the thought over and over again, looking for an answer you’re never going to arrive at.”

While emphasizing that everyone can have “weird and wonky thoughts,” the average person doesn’t think about them to extremes. “We don’t put much interpretation on them,” she said. “We don’t think about them too much. But for the person with OCD, these thoughts are a fact, and they’re a scary fact. I remember hearing once about a woman who was afraid that she brought down a whole planeload of people.”