Don't say someone is OCD. Not because it is insensitive or you are likely unqualified to suggest the diagnosis, but because it is not an adjective. You would not say: 'My cousin is so Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.' So if you insist on labelling a person, say they're OC.

Now that I've got that bit of what many people would think of as a kind of OC language tic out of the way, we can move on.

Describing other people or even oneself as OC has been trendy for a while. We see someone constantly washing their hands, arranging their desks or refrigerators in a specific way, checking and double-checking they've turned off the light, and we think we've identified an OC-sufferer.

There are jokes on T-shirts and posters and office ornaments about them. There's also the interesting fringe group who see themselves as having similar traits and wear it like a badge of pride: 'My entire wardrobe is arranged according to colour and length. Am I OC or what?'

Really, on the surface, it seems we're inclined to be a bit charmed by the disorder. Especially these days when the rules for safe living and reducing the spread of covid19 say we must wash, wash, wash and not touch people.

If all of this seems like what you know, here's the news: it's wrong. As in incorrect. False. Misleading. Not right.

I feel we took a wrong turn at ignoring the significance of the word 'disorder.' Specifically, it's a type of anxiety disorder.

It's such a bizarre thing to have got so wrong, because all the words we need to understand it are right there in the name. It doesn't have a vague, obscure or silly name.

OCD is characterised by recurring, unwanted thoughts and fears - these be the obsessions. These thoughts lead you to perform repetitive actions - the compulsions. 

Some of these thoughts do, in fact, have to do with germs or contamination and may cause you to do a lot of the handwashing, surface-wiping, contact-avoidance things that we see in the jokes and gross misrepresentations in popular culture. (Think of the TV series Monk, or Jack Nicholson's character in As Good As It Gets.)

But it seems we got stuck right about here.

There are other versions of the disorder that feature other troubling and intrusive thoughts, such as sexual ones (and not in a good way; more in a way the person finds repulsive or appalling) or violent ones (to the self or others).

Having trouble dealing with doubt or uncertainty is another feature.

Experts at the Baylor College of Medicine describe categories of the disorder, including, but not limited to: contamination OCD, checking OCD, symptomatic OCD, perfectionism OCD, sexual intrusive thoughts, and harming intrusive thoughts.

This is a time-consuming, debilitating, lifestyle-compromising problem. Repetitive actions like counting in certain patterns, following specific routines, repeating a set of words or phrases take time.

The thing is, these actions are not fun for the person performing them, but they have to.

This is how the obsession part of the disord