Please use "OCD" in its proper context

"I'm really OCD about that."

No, you're not.

"I think everyone has a little OCD in them."

No, they don't.

"OCD" is not an adjective. Nor is it a trait. It is a disease. A disease which people actually suffer from. Equating your pet peeves to a disease is extremely pejorative to those of us who actually have the illness. Making that comparison trivializes the real thing and puts it on the same order as personality quirks.

This perception of what OCD is comes from what OCD produces: incessant hand-washing, incessant cleaning, repetitive checking, meticulous ordering, etc. But these are just from the compulsive side of OCD.

OCD stands for "obsessive compulsive disorder." What happens is the person regularly encounters unwanted anxious thoughts (obsessions) which cannot be suppressed. The compulsions follow as a coping mechanism to fight these crippling obsessions. For example, someone might have the anxiety that if the house is a mess, then someone will trip over an item and hurt themselves; to cope with this anxiety, they keep the house spotless. Someone might have the anxiety that if they leave the door unlocked, then someone will break in and their possessions will be stolen; to cope with this anxiety, they go back and repeatedly check that the doors are locked. There are several other examples of obsessive thoughts and their resulting compulsions, and they are always unique to the individual.

Equating "OCD" with a weird habit completely ignores the actual war that people with OCD face against their mind. There are cases of OCD where people do not have any compulsions; instead, they just suffer through the anxious obsessions. I am one of those people. We face the battle of people not believing us when we claim that we have OCD. I sometimes even find myself distrusting Dr. Ono's diagnosis of me. We don't have compulsions, so what people associate with "OCD" does not match up with us. This again completely ignores the years and years of negative thoughts that our brains have told us.

So the next time you are telling someone about a weird habit of yours, think at least twice before you say, "I'm really OCD about that." Because actually, you're not.