in reply to Re: [OT] General bad habits and characteristics (non programming).
in thread [OT] General bad habits and characteristics (non programming).

Obsessive compulsive:
Nothing ever seems good enough--I always want to improve things. Of course, this means that I hate declaring something to be a final release. I'd leave things in beta longer than Google, if I could get away with it.
Wow, that sounds absolutely nothing like OCD.

It's a shame that so many people trivialize OCD by equating it with innocuous personality traits like perfectionism or tidyness. OCD is a terrible condition to have -- characterized by uncontrollable, irrational, and paralyzing anxiety.

Using OCD to label what you've described is like telling people that I have Alzheimer's because I keep forgetting the syntax for pack and need to use perldoc every time.

</rant>

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Re^3: [OT] General bad habits and characteristics (non programming).
by Adrade (Pilgrim) on Jun 24, 2005 at 00:07 UTC
    Well, a person can meet some but not all of the diagnostic criteria of any illness - to the aforementioned point, these disorders are usually diagnosed when the disorder significantly disrupts the patients life - jobs, friends, other social functioning, etc. Of course, if the symptoms of any condition were to advance a person's life, it could never really be considered an illness.

    I don't think that anyone was trying to trivialize any illness, and its apt to note that OCD quite probably is related to the quasi-obsessions of which the original poster speaks, although on a massive, overgrown, and uncontrollable scale. Also, you are quite right, imo, to mention that OCD is quite terrible as, in most cases, it very dramatically prevents the sufferer from living a normal life, and can be quite sad to witness. Fortunately, psychologists are now making advances in cognitive therapies to augment the more traditional behavioral methods that have shown success, and psychopharm researchers have shown treatment efficacy using the relatively safe SSRI class of antidepressants.

      -Adam

    --
    Impossible! The Remonster can only be killed by stabbing him in the heart with the ancient bone saber of Zumakalis!

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