Make it three seashells and youâve got a winner.
A prerequisite for any diagnosis is that it negatively disrupts oneâs life in ways not adequately explained by the cultural environment.
If I collect âI Love Lucyâ merchandise, Iâm an oddball. If I canât afford to eat because Iâve spent all my money on commemorative plates, then Iâve got a disorder. More controversially â if I have frequent auditory hallucinations that are at worst mildly distracting, then Iâm neurodivergent, whereas if I have frequent auditory hallucinations doing a good job of convincing me to commit suicide in order to escape half-reptile clones of the Pope, then Iâve got a clinical case of (probably) paranoid schizophrenia.
DSM is just an aid to classification for the purpose of making treatment more efficient â if a particular classification is not useful in helping a person avoid whatever self-destructive behaviors they are engaging in, or if despite fitting a classification to the letter they are not engaging in self-destructive behaviors, then that classification is irrelevant to the situation. Medicalization can be a problem, but is a problem primarily in pop-culture â people who donât understand the meaning and purpose of these classifications mis-apply them outside of an unambiguously clinical context perpetuate misunderstandings based on shallow readings and then as a result cause stigma to both people who are struggling with real problems as a result of their diagnoses as well as people who fit classifications without having negative repercussions, primarily by assuming that the two groups are the same.
Nobody (except for children and the extremely stupid) legitimately confuses a tendency toward cleanliness with OCD. A clean person washes his hands before every meal and showers once a day; a person with OCD washes his hands until they bleed, or takes showers in multiples of seven, or has a distressingly hard time suppressing an urge to do something of that type. In the grey area between a non-clinical tendency toward cleanliness and non-clinical obsessive and compulsive tendencies on one side and severe and unambiguous clinical OCD at the other, whether or not any particular personâs case should be treated in a clinical fashion depends on how much distress the condition causes that person. One should expect that the addition of compulsive selling-off of belongings to the list of common expressions of clinical compulsion (along with compulsive shopping, compulsive cleaning, compulsive collecting, hoarding, compulsive exercise, compulsive masturbation, and whatever Iâve missed) would be treated in the same way.
How disturbing it is depends on how hard you go hunting for oddballs to âcureâ and what you are willing to do in trying to do so.
A great many DSM definitions are of the form âsome quirky behavior and/or pattern of thought or other if it rises to the level of substantially distressing them or interfering with the rest of their lifeâ. Itâs sort of a cop-out, in the sense that in suggests substantial ignorance of what, if any, hard diagnostic boundaries exist; but so long as you stick to walk-ins and donât dabble in forced admits it has the great virtue of allowing you to provide a billing code for treating people who arenât having a good time of oddballhood, while not obligating you to do anything about those who arenât troubled by it.
The need to be rigorous and restrained in your diagnostic criteria(while a virtue, and one that would make psychology less goofy as a discipline) only really becomes an urgent ethical problem if you are hunting down and forcibly treating the people you define as sick.
Probably more because of low willingness to pay than any actual sense of restraint; we donât seem to hunt too actively for psych deviants these days. If anything, with a lot of the old institutions closed or downsized, itâs more likely that people who are very, very, likely to qualify as some sort of mentally ill just bounce in and out of contact with the criminal justice system, depending on whether or not their behavior rises to the level of some sort of petty criminality at a given time.
I canât speak for others; but my attempts at self-observation suggest to me that this âde-clutteringâ is not itself a problem; but something that happens because I set the stage for it by repeated cycles of acquisition and failure to follow through on whatever the original plan behind the acquisition was.
Buying the stuff needed to do something is way easier than doing that thing; and (even if you know that you are doing this) itâs seductive to do the buying in order to pretend to yourself that you are actually moving to take action, to do something. Then, once you fail, you still have the stuff. Repeat this a few times and de-cluttering is simply a matter of logistical necessity; but one made more difficult by the fact that getting rid of a given set of things means admitting that whatever project they were attached to just isnât going to happen because you canât hack it and youâve fucked up again.
Complicated by anything being a possible source of parts for some other project.
Even seemingly useless things are useful. That old motherboard that cannot be repaired can still be used for practicing of removal/replacement of SMD parts. That chip taken off board while playing with hot air may not have a datasheet and be useless otherwise, but still can be good enough for trying laser-decapping (it actually works, with excellent depth control, but the last fraction of millimeter is better done chemically). And so onâŚ
Unfortunately âOCDâ has acquired a colloquial non-clinical meaning for trivial normal behaviors like always having to check that the stove is off before leaving the house. Iâve been called OCD for insisting that silverware be segregated by type in its drawer. (By an incredibly disordered slob, but still!)
Whenever a clinical term gets perverted by uninformed laymen, it diminishes its usefulness in ordinary language until it can be corrected. Itâs only recently that people have stopped using âschizoâ as a synonym for multiple personality disorder, and I donât know how long that had been going on. Definitely before my arrival, so⌠probably always.
Iâve never hear that described so succinctly. Or at all, really. [looks around workbench area, cheeks flushing with shame.]
Why should hapy mutants be stigmatized with labels and âtreatedâ with âcuresâ that have no basis in science and are brutal in the extreme? Through its long and tragic history psychiatry has invented numerous âcuresâ which eventually proved destructive in the extreme. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mentally troubled patients were literally subjected to torture devices. Next it was ice baths and insulin shock. Then electroconvulsive therapy that caused broken teeth and bones as well as loss of memory and regression into comatose states. Next, it was prefrontal lobotomies with an ice pick through the eye socket. Today it is drugs.
It is now routine psychiatric practice to label and stigmatize youth with wholesale diagnoses of mental disorders. It is staggeringly profitable business. But while psychiatrists rake in billions, society receives a new generation of life-long drug addicts and thus still more customers for psychotropic drugs.
Today, the marketing of antidepressants has likewise reached nightmarish proportions, and the scenario becomes even more disturbing when one considers the explosively violent episodes such drugs precipitate. Moreover, there is categorically no evidence that diseases such drugs claim to treat even existâwhich is to say, itâs all an elaborate and deadly hoax.
We should work to expose and eradicate the brutalization of patients in the name of âmental health.â
Through your torture they receives a closet
Just to psychiatry does not with this in
The seemly rake in a god writing the
Extreme. Today with an end this is good
Youth with beautyâs in the extreme. How this
Is drugs. For memorial basis in which
Wondrous nineteenth centuries eyes can
And that made. Rather put them categorically
You have no leisure after all you were
Literally subjected buses patients
Were it also when by others who. Loveâs.
Copy what silent upon thousands upon
Thousands just in constructing meaning were
Born broken, it was but do left me nightmarish.
#FTFY
I think you might have been meaning to reply to someone else perhaps?
My comment was more about decluttering then OCD, BUT I absolutely agree, OCD can be quite serious and is not something to be mockedâŚ
Decluttering in and of itself is not a disorder, OCD is a disorder and certainly could be focused on decluttering. While this doesnât make decluttering the disorder, it makes it a possible behavior that OCD could exhibit compulsively.
I think youâre all confused. Judging by the time frame, weâre probably looking at an Infinity War.
That is completely not true.
But I donât know how to use the three seashells.
Wish I could give this a million likes.
Personally I prefer not to let material possessions live rent-free in my finite and valuable conscious awareness. This is not the same as keeping them in my desk drawer or closet. I possess things that are useful to me. I donât worry about minimizing how many things are. I have a home. It has storage space for a reason. I can understand if someone really canât afford more than say a room-to-board and actually canât afford to keep much, but Iâve noticed that most of the people who fret over reducing their material possessions arenât without the means to live in a house or an ample-sized apartment.
My inexpert theory is that the rampant commercial materialism of our culture creates habitual thoughts about stuff, which then prevents people from procuring things without giving those things constant mental real-estate. Clearly this would quickly become exhausting, with every possession preoccupying your mind to the exclusion of other thoughts. Also, marketing convinces people to buy things for which they donât actually have uses, which costs money that they had to earn or debt that theyâll eventually have to earn to repay, so they regret the expenditure and seek to purge it like an anorexic purging desert, because itâs easier to forget about a mistake once youâve disposed of the evidence. I believe this is called buyerâs remorse.
Efficiency is seductive, but thereâs a point of diminishing returns one has, IMHO, long since past if theyâre expending mental energy on what they can dispense with. I really donât mean to sound smug, but what works for me is simply ignoring marketing and procuring things when I have some immediate use for them, or I know for a fact that I will actually need them in the foreseeable future. Sure I have stuff in my closet that I only use occasionally, but I donât waste thought and peace of mind on contemplating their presence there. Itâs just stuff. I have better things to occupy my timeâŚlike thinking about fascinating esoteric topics such as why human beings develop obsession with things.
Another behavior I practice is to make possessions personal. Build a table instead of buying one. I slept for months on a mattress and box-spring on the floor instead of buying a bed that wouldnât really be mine. I donât have a huge amount of free-time, but I spent what little time I did have that summer on following some really cool instructions I discovered online for building a rustic platform bed, then running the headboard under a large-bed CNC machine to engrave a poem I once wrote. I will never get rid of that bed. And whenever I lay down on it, or on the rare occasion when I have good reason to bring it up in conversations such as this, I feel satisfaction, not frustration or anxiety, about itâs presence in my home.
Also, expanding on fuzzyfungusâs comment, itâs not only simpler to gear up than to take productive action on a new enterprise, itâs also simpler, though I would argue that itâs not really easier in a quality-of-life sense, to worry about whether you will use said gear once you have it than to then take the action for which you told yourself you had acquired the gear in the first place. Again, IMHO, this may reflect a deficit of maturity and self-discipline, to wit the self-control needed to finish what you start, and only start what you finish, which only becomes harder if you waste time and focus on mentally juggling your possessions.
Just my 2¢.
Youâre just a Supressive Person and I canât hear you NYAAAH NYAHH NYAHHH
Fair make your frown game by giving psychotropic
Drugs. Yet in importance several plot shock
Use in that bed is drugs. Cut out of even
More all those things you will resemble the order
Which only care in the shame psychotropic
Stolân cut prefrontal lobotomies of
That when take psychiatric practice is which
Were the brutalization of patients
In conversations such the legal use
Drugs poison what little time unappreciated
Eye socket point invented choose the order
Drug addicts and whenever I there be
Blamâd also, but weep drugs poison would quickly
Become exhausting. Proud to make a mistake.
Unfortunately, G.I. Joe lied to all of us. Not only is knowing not half the battle; it is something so orthogonal to the battle that describing it as a portion of the battle, however small, is pretty much a category error.
Knowing is what lets you dread the impending impact with the problem you are walking straight into, eyes open; because whatever the problem is, it isnât a knowledge problem.
So this all comes down to genericization of labor. Why store food in big bulky refrigerators when you can just grow what you need?
Our garden improves every year. But a frig is just a tool for personalizing the food, in my case keeping it prepped for cooking, and I LOVE cooking. If I can use something to make something else, then for me that makes it personal. That said, a DIY frig sounds like a fun project, making me wonder how I might improve on the wastefulness of a store-bought model. Thanks for the idea 
Please understand that Iâm not saying everyone should mimic my approach to inventory. It works for me and I thought Iâd share. But frankly, if a de-cluttering lifestyle (or hoarding for that matter, provided you donât hoard animals you canât care for) works for you, and it either doesnât cause you anxiety or the anxiety it does cause is acceptable to you, then do your thing. Psychiatryâs role should be to serve the patient, not the fads and judgements of society. It should be an avenue of assistance for self-transformation open to those who want it, not a Procrustean bed on which to lay out Happy Mutants.
