Lived Experience 3. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

This comes from MvM, chapter 5. It purports to be a study of Obsessive and Compulsive Disorder, and is by Mary Haase.

This issue for me in this chapter is how a phenomenological study needs to be more than superficial and descriptive (although the descriptive might be interesting if this is new to you). This chapter is based around interviews with OCD sufferers and places the accounts of disorder alongside parallel accounts of 'normality'. The details of each are specific to particular sufferers - do they have OCD only, or a more complex syndrome? Are they typical? The accounts are chosen as exotic and strange. If you consider taking 40 minutes to put your knickers on strange, and inability to drive a car without feeling you have killed someone pecular, then you will enjoy this chapter. If you have never encountered this before, you may learn from it.

The chapter is based on a very simple qualititive methodology, of interviewing and transcribing. What does it tell us about the real lived experience of OCD? The writer is a reporter, not a sufferer. The writer has to try to step into the shoes of the sufferer. She has to understand that counting fenceposts and paving slabs is normal, that adopting behaviour, however strange, that ensures your husband or wife's survival is natural, that keeping the environment scrupulously clear is essential. That is not achieved in a brief round of interviews. Everything that screams to the writer, "This is odd" has to be bracketed out. The writer has to see oddity as ordinary, as their target interviewees do.

So what is the lived experience of the OCD sufferer? We can recount the daily rituals. But why do the eyes say 'I see' and the brain depict the memory as the opposite - that the switch is on and not off, that the door is unlocked and not locked, even though it has been checked 50 times? Why does the brain see an off switch self switching to on? Or see electricity leaking out of plugs like gas? The experience of OCD is to see falsehood based on anxiety as true. That we can psychoanalyse it makes little difference, and show within childhood why this might have originated. How does it happen that the suffer knows rationally what is real but is nevertheless overcome by the conviction that their actions has caused or will cause someone's death.

This task as set is difficult. I use it only to show the danger of being satisfied by a surface description when the underlying realities are not only more interesting, but are actually the point. The task is not to paint people as crazy, but to sympathetically show part of what is going on, as a contribution to finding answers.