Super OCD

Weird indeed.
I have CDO. It's like OCD, but with the letters in alphabetical order -- like they're supposed to be.
—Chris Addison in Lab Rats

Recently "upgraded" to Acceptable Targets, someone with Super OCD requires ORDER in their life. Everything has to match some kind of pattern that they approve of. Lines must be straight, angles must be just the right degree, and the numbers must absolutely match. This doesn't have to be a pattern that makes sense. Social skills will be extremely difficult. In some genre, this comes side-by-side as an Equivalent Exchange for some kind of math power or Hyper Awareness.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is frequently misrepresented in fiction. Most people are surprised to find that rituals are not the defining trait of OCD—in reality, it is an anxiety disorder that causes repeated, unwanted thoughts. The rituals (which may or may not have anything to do with order) are simply attempts to stop those thoughts. Fiction so exaggerates the "order" part in OCD that people are downright dumbfounded to find out that OCD/ADHD exists (Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, on the other hand, really is all about order).

Can be Justified if the character has a career in chemistry or something similar, where it really is crucial to have measurements and such just right.

Often a trait of the Defective Detective or the Mad Mathematician. See also Schedule Fanatic, a person who requires everything to be done precisely on time. For a less extreme version, see Neat Freak. When this becomes a super power see Clock King. A certain type of character will act like this for no other reason than to annoy people.

Examples of Super OCD include:

Anime and Manga

  • Death the Kid from Soul Eater is obsessed with symmetry, to the point that, in one episode, he was defeated after a blade cut off a couple centimeters of his hair on one side and he freaked out. At one point, in the middle of a hunt, he abandoned his two sidekicks to go home and make sure a painting was hanging straight. It was. It always is. He did manage to fight back (with Unstoppable Rage, no less) after seeing just how blatantly asymmetrical his enemy was.
    • More than half-way through an exam, Kid was still trying to write his name, and had a complete psychological breakdown when he erased too hard and tore the paper.
    • As it turns out, the reason he has such bad OCD is that he's an Elder God representing the madness of Order.
  • Chiri Kitsu from Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei. It's in her freakin' name! Not even having to kill will stop her from balancing the world. But it's that kind of show.
    • She's so precise, when she speaks, the punctuation shows up onscreen. Also, her Cross-Popping Veins are perfectly symmetrical and located in the middle of her forehead (though not always, oddly enough).
    • And, recently, she's been taking this WAY beyond eleven. You probably would have never thought that someone with OCD could have a vicious murder streak in the name of order.
  • It's a common fan theory that L and Near in Death Note have this, especially Near.
    • Mikami also has shades of this trope - his daily schedule is exact to the minute. It's part of what gets him caught.
    • Light shows signs of this as well; he seems to be a Neat Freak with routines he HAS to go through i.e. he has to place his shoes just so, doesn't leave the house much, always locks the door and sets it up so he'll know if someone was in his room and messed with his stuff (it's implied he did this even before he needed to) etc. (Insert joke about how just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.)
  • In Pokémon Special, Black is apparently so incapable of not thinking about challenging the League and becoming the best that he needs his Munna to literally eat his dreams away so that he can concentrate on the matters at hand. One wonders what would happen if he was separated from his Pokemon in a dire situation.
    • As it turns out, Black really can't concentrate without his Munna, making this a bit of a Fatal Flaw.
  • In Darker than Black, every contractor has a remuneration for using their powers, sometimes an involuntary reaction but more often an overwhelming compulsion. The second enemy contractor we see in the series had to find things to arrange at equidistant points in a quadrilateral, which allows Hei to kill him effortlessly while he's doing it.

Comic Books

  • Done literally in Damage Control with Edifice Rex, a cosmically-powered crewman. He declares his duty was to clean the entire planet. He later vows to clean the universe by putting everything back in the primordial cosmic egg.

"A world where garbage bags have built in handles. Where zip-lock stripes turn green, to assure proper sealage. Where spray cleaner comes in a bottle with setting both spray and stream. So many gifts they have, so untidy they are. Rejected though I am, I will leave them with this gift: a world of perpetual neatness. With a place for everything -- and everything in its place!"

Fan Fiction

  • In Dept Heaven Apocrypha, we have Ledah, who is eventually revealed to have OCD after implications of such throughout most of the early story. However, as the OCD is one of the many facets of his rape-induced PTSD (and as Ledah is The Woobie), this is played seriously and for sympathy.
  • The Homestuck fanfic "four titles" interprets Jade's "space" powers as giving her a side-effect of Super OCD;

some kind of obsessive-compulsive need for things to line up straight in three-dimensional space - the corners of the tent not matching in elevation, say, or pictures needing to be hung exactly evenly on the walls.

  • In the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfic The Turning of the Screwball, the character of Button Stitch is so obsessively organized than even Rarity thinks she's a bit high-strung. Her self-repressive levels of OCD are what lead to a build-up of magical energy that causes her to turn back into "Screwball" (the weird floating background pony from "Return of Harmony, Part 2") and pull bizarre pranks around Ponyville.

Film

  • The Aviator is centered around Howard Hughes' (played by Leo Di Caprio, see Real Life below) struggle with his advanced OCD. While the film treads familiar territory (task repetition, cleanliness, isolation), it also shows how Hughes was able to use the condition to become a famous billionaire. His manic attention to detail allows him to win Oscars, buy airlines, and fight the US Senate.
  • As Good as It Gets plays this for drama, with Jack Nicholson's character showing several common OCD fixations, like being unable to walk on the lines between paving stones and only using disposable forks, even in restaurants.
    • Oh, those are the pedestrian quirks. The really bad stuff is needing to have several dozen pre-packaged soap bars to wash his hands with, because he'll only use one for a few seconds before throwing it away. A new soap bar every trip to the bathroom? Sure, cuts down on germ exposure. Three or four every time you wash your hands? Holy crap.
  • M-O from WALL-E stands for Microbe Obliterator, which is an apt name for a droid who is dead serious about cleaning anything remotely foreign-contaminated.
  • This Japanese short.
  • Owen from Superstar. He has to say and do everything five times.
  • The Futurama movie "Bender's Game, Rosie appears in a mental institute saying "Must clean up! Everything must be clean! That's why the Dog had to die! He was a Dirty dog! Dirty! Dirty! And that boy Elroy! Dirty! Dirty! Not only does She have super OCD but shes A murderer!


Folklore

  • Vampires. According to legend, scattering grain is a good way to stop a vampire, as they will be compelled to count it, which gives the victim time to escape, and may keep them out past sunrise. The only modern vampire depiction with this feature is Sesame Street's The Count, and they did it seemingly by accident.
  • It was used in the X-Files. Mulder defeated a vampire by spilling his sunflower seeds.
    • Except when they play with it and have the vampire counting the damn things before they hit the ground.
      • The sequel to Dracula2000 uses it this way. When a group of idiot kids decide to mess around with Dracula, they try to slow him down by throwing a handful of seeds at him. It goes into a brief Bullet Time and Dracula nonchalantly states the number of seeds and keeps going.
    • This legend features in My Swordhand Is Singing, which contains very traditional vampires.

Literature

  • Some portrayals of Hercule Poirot borders on this, as he wants everything orderly and frequently complains that eggs won't form neat little cubes. It sometimes helps him notice clues, because he notices everything that's out of order. Then again, in some books it's more of a quirk than a disability.
  • The protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe's story Berenice has frequent fits in which he becomes acutely obsessed with random topics to the point of going into a trance-like state. When he focuses on his moribund fiance's teeth (and how white and curiously elongated they have been getting lately) it does not end well.
  • Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Around the World in Eighty Days, demands super-human fastidiousness from his servants; he actually fired a servant for giving him shaving water that was two degrees too cold. He is also a Schedule Fanatic.
    • The schedule part is pretty useful when you have to travel around the world by rail in 80 days.
  • Melanie Watt's Scaredy Squirrel character. The Animated Adaptation plays play up this tendency. Obsessive. Compulsive. Squirrel.
  • David Cusk in The Pale King. Thanks to his fear of being noticed for his sweating, he eventually develops the ability to keep track of a room's temperature, the locations and distances of the exits, sight lines and proximity of every person in the room, and quickly strategize ways to avoid detection.
  • Vampires in the Discworld novels are described as being very focused. Usually, they use this focus to enable them to feed. But the vampires who give up on feeding on human blood soon find out that they have to redirect this focus unto anything that doesn't remind them of "the B-vord". Collecting seems to be very popular amongst tee-totaling vampires.
    • Also in Going Postal, we are introduced to Stanley. He was raised by peas and is "quite intense" about pins. Later he graduated to stamps, which were made possible thanks to Stanley's obsessive neat pin-sheets. (The regular holes they left were the inspiration for the stamps' perforation)
  • In the Artemis Fowl book The Atlantis Complex, the titular mental disease is this trope Played for Drama. In stage one the afflicted becomes obsessed with numbers—five is good, while another number (four, in Artemis' case) is bad. Stage two involves the creation of an alternate personality; for Artemis, a romantic sop who called himself Orion and spent most of his time trying to woo Holly with bad poetry. On the plus side, the alternate personality doesn't suffer from the number problem.
  • The Godspoken on the planet of Path in Orson Scott Card's Xenocide in the Ender's Game series were believed to commune with god with their strange rituals. Turns out that they were all inflicted with OCD by the Starways Congress to balance out their significantly above average intellect and keep them in line. Qing-jao's ritual is tracing woodlines until her anxiety and panic goes away. She and the other Godspoken of Path also exhibit other behaviors usually believed to be typical of OCD, such as excessive hand washing. This condition does have the bonus effect of making them very methodical workers; Qing-jao slowly and methodically looks at every possible piece of evidence and becomes the only person to realize the true identity of Demosthenes and the existence of a creature like Jane. A cure for the OCD is eventually created and spread through Path, letting them retain their brilliance without being subjected to the humilation caused by their rituals.
    • It should be noted that the priests are fully aware of the existence of OCD. However, the normal drugs that help fight OCD don't work for the Godspoken.

Live Action TV

  • Monk: They sometimes do portray this as a seriously debilitating illness, but just as often it's portrayed as funny. The idea is that he's Cursed with Awesome, so that he notices every detail of a crime scene, picking up clues that no one else would.
    • In one episode, his doctor finds an effective drug that helps Monk tone down his OCD considerably, at the expense of his attention to detail. By the end of the episode he's back to his usual self.
    • Ironically, Howie Mandel (also being OCD in real life) guest-starred as a cultist who tries to help Monk get over his condition when he spends time at their commune to investigate.
  • Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. A good example is when the cushion that was "his spot" on the sofa was stained and he spent the time in which the cushion was being cleaned slowly going crazy, eventually going to the point where he was crouching over the spot where he used to sit. Howard tries to solve the problem by grabbing Rajesh's cushion and placing it in Sheldon's spot. Rajesh starts to complain, giving us:

Howard: Who cares where you sit? You are not crazy!

    • In the thirty seconds it took Rajesh to find a new place to sit, Sheldon had found something unacceptable about the new cushion and the fun was restarted.

Sheldon: These shrimp are all the same size, there's no logical order to eat them in. [chucks them into the garbage can]

  • Odo in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine gets this a lot, along with a very deep sense of justice. It makes him an excellent chief of security, as he will follow a case doggedly, running down options and suspects very swiftly. It also means he won't indulge in such little things as police brutality, meaning his cells tend to be the safest place for a criminal to stay. Dax got a lot of fun out of sneaking into his quarters and moving things around just a couple centimeters. When he later discovered his people, the Founders, it turned out "establishing order" is kind of their hat. On the other hand, their idea of order and his idea of justice were completely incompatible.
    • Probably related to their biology. Shapeshifting must require superhuman attention to detail.
  • At times, James May from Top Gear.
  • Mrs. Benson on iCarly, flits between this and Neat Freak Depending on the Writer.
  • Emma Pillsbury on Glee, a severe mysophobe with an irrational fear of germs. This has naturally made her one of the biggest Neat Freak ever, to the point that she cleans every grape individually before eating it and spends an hour cleaning a pencil sharpener.
  • Some of the killers in Criminal Minds, including a man who is at one point seen washing his hands with what looks like a fresh bar of soap, then throwing it away after one use.
    • The very second episode featured a girl with a severe fixation with the number three. It got to the point that she believed God was speaking to her through patterns involving it... He told her to burn things.
  • Monica from Friends. She can tell if the furniture has been moved even an inch, and will have a near panic attack at the thought of it.
    • How bad she was was really Depending on the Writer. In one episode, Chandler cleans the apartment to make Monica happy. When Monica came home, she did notice that things were moved, but she thought that the gesture was sweet.
  • In Scrubs, Dr. Kevin Casey has extreme OCD. It gives him the benefit of practicing things over and over until he does them perfectly, but the drawback of practicing things over and OVER until he does them perfectly. He starts out every day by literally touching EVERYTHING in his first patient's room. He can't even enter the room without timing his last step to his breath.
  • In the Very Special Episode Emmy Bait parody on The Drew Carey Show Mimi has a relapse into Super Duper OCD, which Drew uses to his advantage.
  • Bree from Desperate Housewives used to be very bad about this, though she did lighten up about it later on, and it's now been reduced to her making the occasional quip about using a coaster or keeping something straight or neat.
    • In the early days? Let's just say that she and Rex might have had that reconciliation if it weren't for her being too distracted by a dripping burrito to continue. Unlike most examples on this page, however, it has also been played for drama, and was just one of many factors leading to her nervous breakdown at the end of season two.
  • Used as a one-off gag in Kamen Rider Fourze: In episode 7, the Power Trio are in detention, along with the Jerk Jock and Goth girl. When they ask the Goth what she's in for, she explains that she hacked the school computer and deleted every single picture from a school event...because her hair ribbon was slightly off-kilter in one of the pictures.
    • Played seriously eight episodes later. The Monster of the Week is a painter who really wants his painting to be perfect and will petrify anyone who disturbs him to get his wish...which includes the sweet little girl trying to help the Glee Club with a cute song about a satellite.
  • Whitechapel has Joseph Chandler, a homicide detective, who is incredibly obsessed with neatness, as well as things being clean. His OCD is bad enough that he often stays at the Homicide Department overnight, making everything neat for the next day...only for him to end up spending the entire night doing this. It should be noted, however, that while most of the examples of Super OCD are Played for Laughs, Chandler's OCD is shown as an illness and a serious issue, rather then something used for comedy.
  • On Being Human (UK) vampires who stop drinking blood try to develop daily patterns and routines so they can stop themselves from constantly thinking about blood and killing. Mitchell tried to build a 'normal' routine life for himself but kept failing. Hal managed to created complex daily rituals for himself and managed to suppress his vampire urges by religiously following them for over 50 years. However, this caused him to cut all contact with the outside world and when his routines are disrupted he becomes violent and unstable.
  • While Danny Tanner in Full House is generally just a Neat Freak, he reaches Super OCD levels when his personal Christmas of Spring Cleaning time comes around. Another episode has the girls moving every single item on Danny's wall a few inches to the side because he'd otherwise notice the one thing they had to move to cover a hole in the wall.


Music

  • Dream Theater's song "Constant Motion" was written by former drummer Mike Portnoy about his struggle with OCD.

Theatre

  • Kathy in Vanities is an obsessive organizer, who has a nervous breakdown when things stops going according to her plans.

Video Games

  • Sion from Melty Blood. One point early in their meeting, Shiki calls her a "bastard." She gets very upset and informs him, that no, the acceptable word for insulting a woman is "bitch." Note, she's not insulted by the actual name calling, just that it's wrong.
    • In the ending where she befriends both Shiki and Akiha; she takes alternating turns on siding with Shiki or Akiha when Shiki tries to sneak out of the house. Super OCD or True Neutral? Can't it be both?
    • She also gets ticked off at the concept of "randomness". Being able to subdivide her mind into several rooms and analyze each possible outcome in a very short amount of time, she can figure out the outcomes of every (or at least many) possible series of events.
  • The Neurotic trait in The Sims 3. Sims who have it will worry about random objects, obsess about their hygiene, and check and re-check things like the stove and the fireplace. It doesn't make them a Neat Freak, though, so for a proper case of Super OCD the player would have to combine it with the Neat trait.
  • Minecraft tends to evoke this trope in the players. You WILL have a specific way in which to order your inventory for maximum efficiency, and you will cringe EVERY time you see a Let's Play that has a person who does not stack all of their items properly.
    • Don't forget about misplacing a block or leaving behind unmined ore.
  • Giratina in the Pokémon games. It's so obsessed with maintaining order between dimensions that it will violently attack anyone it perceives as a threat to either the Pokemon Universe and/or the Reverse/Distortion World. It got to the point where Arceus had to banish it to another dimension (IE: the aforementioned Reverse/Distortion World).
  • SWAT 4 afflicts your AI teammates with this in singleplayer. If you order your squadmates to do anything to a door, they will neatly stack up on the door before doing anything else. So if you ordered all 4 of them over and one is being blocked from reaching his position (most often by you) they will incessantly tell you to move over and refuse to carry out their order until everyone is on the PIXEL.

Webcomics

  • Hannelore in Questionable Content, which is probably deliberate instead of not doing the research, because author Jeph Jacques himself has OCD. She appears to have both a fairly accurate case of OCD and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, and possibly a few phobias as well, not entirely unlike the Monk example. She also has some more problems that probably aren't the direct result of a mental illness, like some unfamiliarity with normal social protocol due to having a weird upbringing, and occasional hallucinations brought on by her chronic insomnia.
    • It comes and goes depending on what the joke requires; for example, when she was first introduced, she was in the men's room watching Marten pee in a sink, which would be unthinkable with her current characterization. This is semi-justified because she's constantly switching meds in a desperate search for a combination that will properly control all her varied and sundry neuroses, phobias, and disorders without reacting badly or slamming her with nasty side effects.
  • Melody from Coming Up Violet qualifies as an example, and was once the page picture. Though, to be fair, it probably doesn't help that she's a hyperactive chinchilla in High School.
  • Abner VanSlyk of Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name is a diagnosed mysophobic. He's obsessed to the point of wearing gloves and a surgical mask while working.
  • Mordecai Heller from Lackadaisy is this, as well as being completely sociopathic. In one of the pre-canon comics, he gave a long rant to the person he was about to murder about how his position on the back seat was throwing off the aesthetic balance of the car.
  • Some (but probably not all) vampires in A Loonatics Tale. In Job Hunting: Rehired, one character scatters change on the ground to distract the Cruor brothers. Lynch gets caught up counting the coins, but wealth-obsessed businessman Lee takes the cake, as he gets caught up counting the value of the coins.

Web Original

  • Fractious of the Whateley Universe, whose Reality Warper powers tend to make things worse for her Super OCD. Her manifesting as a mutant also means her old meds don't work on her anymore, and she has the associated General Anxiety Disorder. Done pretty accurately: the author claims to be OC and to have a child with clinical OCD.
    • To put it another way, she's based on Diane Castle, who is practically the poster child for Shown Their Work.
  • This video features someone with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

Western Animation

  • Mr Herriman from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.
  • Trent from Total Drama Action, develops a Super OCD obsession with the number 9
  • Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh is obsessed with keeping things clean, tidy, and in place and if someone—usually Tigger—messes with it, he goes nuts.
  • Mechanicles from the Aladdin animated series. All of his schemes in the show revolve around his need to keep things clean and tidy (melting desert sand to create flawless glass, wiping out a rainforest to destroy all the bugs, "steam-cleaning" the Earth by boiling the oceans, ect.). He also keeps an organized "things to do" list with him at all times. In his debut episode, Aladdin and co. press his Berserk Button by making a mess in his headquarters as a distraction.
  • Breach of Generator Rex teleported the city of Greenville, Ohio to a pocket dimension, where she turned it into a Silent Hill-like "dollhouse." The whole place, while creepy, is very-well organized, with mopeds perfectly aligned in the streets and ice cream trucks carefully stacked on top of each other. Messing the place up is a good way to get her angry, and she wasn't exactly the most stable individual to begin with. Her OCD is actually so bad that she literally implodes if the destruction gets to be too much for her.
  • Antoine from Sonic Sat AM this is taken to the extremes in the filler episode The Odd Couple.
  • The Earl of Lemongrab of Adventure Time displays many attributes of this on several occasions. According Patrick Seery, a production assistant on the show, "he likes order." Which means that anything that's even REMOTELY un-orderly freaks him out. As soon as he walked into the candy castle, he saw candy people pillow-fighting, and Cinnamon Bun lying on the floor, which was covered in candy-muck. He screamed that the castle was in "UNACCEPTABLLLEE CONDITIIIOONN!!!" and sent everybody in the room to thirty days in the dungeon. "IF ANYONE NEEDS ME I'LL BE TAKING A NAP! A..a-a...and clean this place up or Dungeon! THREE HOURS DUNGEON!!!"
  • Rarity from My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. She had difficulty tearing herself away from fixing a messy bookcase despite the presence of a much bigger problems, namely the tree that crashed into Twilight's house (which happen to cause said messy bookcase). See also the bird's nest bit in "Winter Wrap-Up". She's not afraid to get her hooves dirty for the sake of her friends and neighbors, however, as seen when she helps shift a fallen tree in "Look Before You Sleep", or when she hides in a mud puddle as part of a plan to participate in a messy obstacle course with her little sister in "Sisterhooves Social".
    • Twilight Sparkle has some elements of this as well. Just watch pretty much the entirety of "Swarm Of The Century". Also, in "Look Before You Sleep", she's too busy looking up whether or not a tree crashing through the window fits into a slumber party to help shift the tree. Her obsession with order also causes a lot of trouble in "Lesson Zero", like when she makes a huge mess trying to even out the frosting on the cupcakes she ordered for a picnic... which is peanuts compared to going crazy because she thinks she's going to be late with her weekly friendship report. And at the start of "It's About Time", she's up at three in the morning worrying that she hasn't made time in this month's schedule to prepare next month's schedule.
      • Twilight's feak-out in Lesson Zero could show her more accurate OCD. She can't stop herself from thinking unwanted and extremely unrealistic thoughts and so she tries with increasing anxiety to stop them.
    • Twilight and Rarity have Super OCD in different areas, both of which are justified by their backgrounds and exacerbated by the fact that they can use magic to straighten things out as much as they want. As an artistic genius Rarity is obsessed with aesthetics while Twilight's history of being a model student (of Equestria's Physical God ruler no less) makes her an extreme by-the-book perfectionist.
      • This has led to the fan-theory that unicorns are more susceptible to mental disorders than the other two pony races due to the source of their magic (their horns) being located so close to their brains.
  • Bloberta from Moral Orel. To the point where she scrubs the UNDERSIDE of the floor tiles as well as the surface.
    • And she even noticed how dirty her cleaning products were.
  • One of Daggett's goons in Batman: The Animated Series. He had a habit of using a napkin to open doors, and was hesitant to assassinate someone at a hospital "with all those sick people". He's the poster boy for Terrified of Germs.
  • Menlo from Recess

Real Life

  • In real life symptoms of OCD can vary hugely; while some people are obsessed with order, others are afraid of contamination and will not touch certain objects or wash their hands repeatedly. Other people don't have any outward compulsions and count in their heads or avoid going near objects or situations that trigger their OCD. And while OCD can have its funny Narmish moments, it is definitely not funny for the sufferer.
    • However, a lot of people misuse OCD to refer to a much happier kind of obsessive personality, which is a common feature of autism, where the person is about as likely to Squee with joy at order as Freak-Out about disorder.
      • Too many people, and not just TV writers, do not do the research when it comes to OCD. Sometimes it does entail needing to take a certain number of steps, wash your hands in a specific way, or any other number of little rituals, but just as often it means that sufferers become quite literally obsessed with specific topics, to the point where they suffer panic attacks, go on angry tangents, have fits of depression, and simply cannot stop thinking about a given topic. Other sufferers find themselves having horrible, obsessive thoughts that they can't get rid of. Such thoughts are often completely absurd or morally abhorrent, but the sufferer finds that they end up harboring those thoughts anyway, and can be just as horrified by them as any other person who learned about them.
      • To further emphasize the above: People who suffer from OCD in the second way described above (sometimes called "pure-O OCD" to reflect the lack of obvious compulsions) are fully aware of how absurd, pathological, or abhorrent their thoughts are and understand that they have no basis in reality (thus distinguishing these thoughts from psychosis). And elaborating on the explanation of compulsions below: despite how the media portrays OCD as people engaging in seemingly arbitrary and meaningless activities for the hell of it, these activities are carefully calculated to ward off the obsessive thoughts precisely because the sufferer knows how abhorrent they would seem to other people.
      • Actually, the 'signature' of OCD is, in fact, the obsessive thoughts. The behaviors—the 'compulsive' part—function to relieve the stress of the obsessive thoughts. Basically? The behaviors are when the obsessive thoughts gets worse, while the behaviors without the thought patterns aren't OCD.
      • Also, what most media present as OCD is really OCPD, Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, which is similar to OCD but where the sufferer may act as these things are rules not just for themselves but for their families, and which is more characterized by the actions than by the obsessive thoughts. The Other Wiki speaks.
    • OCD is also by definition irrational behavior, which means they have particular idiosyncrasies that offhand don't seem to match up. Someone may spend 10 minutes washing their hands after going to the bathroom but are perfectly fine having dirty dishes in the sink. OCD is based on what the individual perceives as disorder and their behavior is about finding some way to establish order. Since the entire world is very disorderly, managing the disorder is about finding what degree of order is acceptable.
  • Marc Summers, the host of |Double Dare and What Would You Do? has OCD. These were two of the messiest and most disorganized games ever to hit TV. He mentions that going to work every day was a battle and he was actually happy when both shows went off the air. This has the effect of making him a major Badass amongst fans. You can now see him as the host of Unwrapped on the Food Network. Pay attention to the table where the various foods he's talking about are laid out. Everything is ordered and laid out very specifically.
  • Howie Mandel is also a sufferer. Watch him on Deal or No Deal - he doesn't shake hands, he bumps fists. Presumably, this is also part of why he shaves his head. He wrote a book about it.
    • It could also be male pattern baldness.
      • Mr. Mandel has explicitly stated during interviews that he shaves his head due to his OCD and that it makes him feel cleaner. Someone I know has a similar condition and finds hair getting 'dirty' (which means contaminated by anything they consider dirty, regardless actual cleanliness) incredibly stressful.
  • Sometimes the superstitions that sports stars have can seriously border on this but a special mention has to go to Ray Allen of the Boston Celtics who cannot seem to pass a piece of paper on the floor without picking it up and gets mad at teammates if they mess up his rituals as well.
  • Howard Hughes was so Obsessive Compulsive about contamination, he peed in jars for years. And kept them in order, too. This was heavily detailed in The Aviator, giving the Freudian Excuse that a community-wide disease scare when he was little caused His Beloved Smother to vigorously hand wash him and intone "you are not safe."
  • Leonardo DiCaprio has it as well. He steadfastly fights it at every turn, claiming that he refuses to step through doorways multiple times or step on every patch of chewing gum on the pavement that he sees to stop it taking over his life. Must be an absolute killer when he's learning his lines...
    • He also played the above-mentioned Howard Hughes in The Aviator
  • British footballer David Beckham has OCD. He says he has to put all the leaflets you get in hotels in order in a drawer, which is probably hell as (being a footballer) he must travel a lot.
  • Jesse Eisenberg has OCD, although he has never elaborated on the specifics on his compulsions.
  • Many of the symptoms of several types of autism overlap those of OCD- including obsessive thoughts and rigidly ritualistic behavior.
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