A kind of amazing thing has been happening in my old post about the OCD of Howard Hughes. It's really quite amazing. It has become a kind of gathering place, for people to share ... Despite the fact that the damn post gets SPAM BOMBED EVERY DAY ... I have made sure to leave it open, because people seem to need to talk. People are Googling the words "Howard Hughes OCD" with more and more frequency ... and they get to me. Read all the comments - it's quite extraordinary.
Posted by sheilaHey Red...
One of your commenters made a particularly salient comment about OCD - namely the difference between OCD and Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD).
As the commenter notes, most people we look at and say "that person is obsessive-compulsive" has symptoms of OCPD, not OCD, because people with OCD are much less functional in society.
Hughes apparently had full-up OCD, not OCPD, and eventually drove him to irretrievable insanity.
Personality disorders, on the other hand, are usually not clinically disabling. But with modern medicine, often the worst ravages of a psychiatic condition like Hughes' OCD can often be avoided.
Posted by: CW at June 6, 2005 10:52 PMCW - thanks, I'll have to go back and take a look. As you can probably tell, I've got doctors, reporters, and people who suffer from OCD all commenting. Some of them are children - 13, 14 years old. Amazing.
Posted by: red at June 6, 2005 10:57 PM