...Is how I’ve come to describe what it’s like living with OCPD and depression. For those who don’t know what OCPD is, I’ll give a brief explanation:
We all know what obsessive compulsive disorder is, at least most of us should. I’m sure we’ve all seen that person who does a ritual around something, and it doesn’t make any sense for them to do so. A good example would be something I saw not long ago, a woman getting out of her car, locks all the doors, and then proceeds to walk around the car, testing the door handle three times and then touching the window of each door before moving on to the next.
At first glance you think, “there’s something wrong with this woman,” and then you move on with your day not realizing the terrible maze she’s trapped in inside of her head. What she’s going through is an obsession over locking her car, or maybe an obsession with safety and feeling secure, and to ease the obsession, she’s developed compulsions to try and alleviate her symptoms, ones that are painful at best, debilitating at worst, but i’ll get into that later. Ultimately the compulsions never fully relieve the symptoms and it can lead to debilitating compulsions if treatment isn’t pursued.
OCPD is Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, and basically what it means is that you can have an obsession without a compulsion. The term acknowledges a set of issues that can be commonly associated with OCD, but is incomplete as far as having the “solution” people come up with in a compulsion.
Some of the general symptoms of OCPD are being overly concerned with perfection, order and control over mental prowess and personal relationships, it can manifest in being a workaholic, and sacrificing family and friendships under the belief that those can hinder working or perfection.
It’s important to note that while there are sets of typical symptoms, experts in the field in treating mental disorders as a whole will tell you that no two people have the same OCD, or depression, or anything else that might afflict the brain. Because the sheer complexity of the brain makes it nearly impossible for things to manifest itself in the exact same way. I can safely say that the problem of OCD and OCPD is about the brain being fixated on things that normally people don’t fixate on.
OCD and OCPD don’t often manifest by themselves, and what I’ve found in myself is that over the years I used to just think that I had depression. It’s a big umbrella word that can cover a lot of things. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to try and isolate what issues come from where, and what I might do to try and lessen them, because as I’ve said earlier, it’s actually painful dealing with OCD.
A good example of how it can be painful is this: Everyone has a thought on occasion that makes no sense, or might even be crazy sounding if you expressed it out loud to people. Sometimes when you get really angry at someone you might think, “fuck them, I hate that person,” now for me I’ll have that thought, only instead of it running it’s course, what will happen is that much like having a song stuck my head on high volume, all I can think about is what the person did, and that I “fucking hate them.” All day, over and over again my brain goes around in circles thinking the same phrase and the same action which ignited it.
The cycle keeps me amped, on high alert. What’s happening is the fight or flight response, the amount of anger that can come from these thoughts and reliving it in my head makes my body think that I’m in danger, and when I’m in danger I’m panicked, ready for action, and not interested in much of anything else until it goes away. It’s exhausting to get through a day of obsession because it takes that much more control not to explode over someone engaging with you in the most simplest of ways; “Hey Brian how’s your day?” might sound like a simple question, but imagine someone asked you that hours after you found out your only child is missing. Suddenly you're screaming about things that make no sense to the person who simply wanted to know what your day has been like.
Often it’s not anything anyone does which starts it, sometimes it’s like my brain is just ready to be obsessed over something and is fixating on one thing or the next until it can land on some kind of conflict, a mistake someone made, something someone said I don’t agree with, or even just the way someone looks at me. When it’s ready to happen it’s going to happen. Nothing I can figure out so far gets it to stop. I can lessen it, (which I’ll get into in another post as this one is getting long as it is,) or I can make it worse. But I can’t stop it.
Okay, so how does this work alongside depression? By comparison, if OCD is too much stimulation, depression is a complete lack of it. OCD is a cup violently overflowing, and depression is no cup at all.
From what I’ve found over the years is that one issue can jump-start the other. Usually it’s the OCPD leading to the depression, and from that observation I’ve come to think about the two like the old Looney Tunes dogs, Chester and Spike. Spike the bulldog is depression, lumbering and big and in the way and stupid, and Chester is OCD, seemingly small but annoying, snarling, nasty and shivering, peeing all over the floor when you scare it, and ultimately the one in charge where this conversation is concerned. I didn’t used to see Chester because Spike is the easy thing to see first. But the relationship between the two creates a “nothing matters but everything hurts” dynamic.
Nothing matters because of the depression, leaving feelings of emptiness, worthlessness, and all the problems that come with it, but everything hurts in that any stimuli that I have to deal with, involves me having to think around this little annoying dog who wants to terrorize anything it can see. This is why the best method many come up with is to isolate themselves. Isolation becomes damage control, if there’s no one around for me to explode at, there’s no one whose feelings I might hurt.
The same can be said with anxiety disorders, as some of the functions of the disorder seem to run along the same path as OCPD, endless worry, stressing, a change in action to accommodate the mental side of it. I’m grossly oversimplifying anxiety disorders here, but if you take away anything from reading this, know that if you’re suffering from depression, it might be possible that you’re actually suffering from something more specific, or something alongside the depression that you’re not seeing. It can take people years of their life to figure this out.
But some people never do. One of the reasons I’m writing this is because yesterday is the anniversary of my cousin’s suicide. Two years ago this week I got that call, and suddenly I found myself at the funeral, realizing that many people of my family are suffering in many of the same ways. It claimed one of us in the most brutal way it could, and yet none of us talked about that. We sat there and listened to the priest, someone who never knew my cousin, speak in generalizations and never once did any of us say how fucked up it all was, or about how likely most of us could relate to what he did because we know what that feels like.
It got me thinking, we aren’t the only ones struggling through tragedies and not talking about it. How many families have had depression pick them all off one by one and no one is the wiser? My goal is to talk about this more, make art about it, and hopefully get people to see that a lot of us suffer, there’s no need to do it in silence. I’ve spent my entire life trying to figure out the labyrinth of my mind, and I think it would be a terrible waste not to share it. I don’t say that because I think I’ve figured it all out, I’m saying it because I haven’t, and by expressing what I think, will give me better odds of finding something better than if I had just stayed silent. And who knows, maybe something I say might help you, the reader.
