Blog Post #2

I remember one day when I was grade-school aged, I was at home and happened to turn on the TV to see a reality show on MTV (its name escapes me) that followed someone living with obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’d never seen the show before, but became so interested in that episode because, for reasons I didn’t know at the time, I felt that I strongly related to the featured person’s experience. After a couple weeks, I’d researched OCD online (rather obsessively, I think it’s funny to add) and started to identify strongly with the disorder.

As a kid, I’d always stay up really late, stressed out, because, for example, I couldn’t turn the lights off, breathe, and step in the right order – and would have to do it repeatedly until I felt that I’d done it correctly. I knew that something was off, but never had the words or background to realize exactly what it was until I’d stumbled on the TV show. An aspect of having OCD that people often don’t know about is that there’s a strange sense of internalized shame that comes with letting compulsive actions (like turning the lights on and off) seep from out of your mind – where they’re just thoughts – into the real world, where people don’t do that. As a result, people with OCD get really skillful at hiding these actions and behaviors when they’re in public, or even around friends or family. This meant that my parents had little, if any, reason to believe that I had OCD when I told them – since they hadn’t observed anything, and since I just seemed like an imaginative kid who’d seen something on TV that influenced me. To make matters worse, neither of my parents really believe any of the newer discourse on mental health, and are convinced that, unless it’s really, really bad and observable, the illness or disorder is just something that the affected person is imagining.

As a result, I was never diagnosed with OCD or treated, and for a lot of my childhood, I remember being extremely depressed and frustrated. Although I still experience symptoms of OCD occasionally, it’s usually only when I’m particularly stressed out or anxious about something; after some reading, I learned in late middle school (when I first experienced the severity of my symptoms decrease) that childhood OCD is sometimes something that can almost be “grown out of”, due to the ways that adolescence changes the brain’s chemistry. So today, I’m free of OCD symptoms probably 95% of the time.

After first learning about OCD from the TV show, I remember noticing my dad display some behaviors that are characteristic of the disorder. For instance, he checks the front and back doors repeatedly each night to make sure they’re locked. When I asked him if he thought he might have OCD, he told me that he doesn’t think he does, and that being repetitive with certain tasks is part of his personality. Reflecting on this today, a few things come to mind for me.

First, I think about Pinker and wonder how likely it might be that I received some sort of OCD gene from my dad. I also think about how my dad is obsessive-compulsive, but perhaps isn’t to the point that it’s a disorder. He explained to me that he doesn’t do tasks repetitively to relieve unrelated anxious thoughts or feelings, as I did and sometimes still do, but just because he really wants to make sure he didn’t forget to lock the door. I think this is a form of boundary work – since he’s obsessive-compulsive, but maybe not past the necessary threshold that would categorize him as someone who has OCD. It doesn’t interfere with his life all that much. Finally, I think about how Latour’s overall argument relates – were my parents right that I was merely influenced by the TV show into thinking that I had OCD, which then manifested in OCD-like symptoms? I really don’t think so, since I vividly remember experiencing those symptoms prior to seeing the TV show. But I’ve been wrong before. And so – unless I’m wrong and misremembering, and that show constructed me to have OCD – this might instead be a blog post about an instance where techno-science (i.e. diagnosis and treatment) perhaps should’ve, but decidedly didn’t, influence my life – but how it ended up okay regardless.