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Viral OCD checklist with 'improvements' is hilarious — but there's more to the story

OCD is a lot more than just "wanting things neat." But the checklist is still funny.

The Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale

A user on Reddit recently posted an OCD symptom checklist given to them by a doctor. It's called the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) and it includes dozens of symptoms and behaviors that can be associated with OCD. It's a helpful diagnostic tool that can help identify whether a person has OCD and how severe it might be.

However, after taking a closer look at the sheet, the OP just had to chuckle.

There's something deliciously ironic about the OCD checklist being absolutely riddled with spelling and formatting mistakes.

The original poster took it upon themselves to use their superpowers of neatness and exactitude to make a few... corrections.

"Behold the cruel checklist my doctor gave me to help identify my specific flavor of OCD. It had room for improvement," they wrote.

Note all the corrections made in red pen.

There are a lot of them!

zenxii_/Reddit

Of particular interest is the category called "Obsession with need for symmetry for exactness."

A section which, ironically, is not indented in the same way as the other category headings!

A few other errors on the sheet include:

  • Extra spaces between words
  • Poor line alignment
  • Missing and inconsistent punctuation
  • Inconsistent bolding and italicization
The document's formatting is so bad, you almost wonder if it was designed that way on purpose.

Users on Reddit got a lot of laughs out of the corrected checklist, to the tune of over 31,000 upvotes.

Of course, OCD is rarely about just "wanting things neat."

person washing hands in sink Photo by Curology on Unsplash

OCD has become a buzzword we throw around casually to describe anyone who is rigid in their thinking about certain things, or excessively tidy or clean.

("Sorry, I'm a little bit OCD about how I organize my desk.")

In reality, that's a stereotype that doesn't even begin to tell the whole story. "Exactness and symmetry" is just one of several categories on the Y-BOCS.

OCD is also characterized by these obsessions and compulsions becoming so intrusive they interfere with day to day life.

Other users in the thread chimed in with what OCD really looks like for them:

"I spent several years driving 10 minutes out of my way on a daily commute because I was afraid that if I drove over this specific bridge I was going to yeet myself off it. I had no intent to kill myself I was just terrified I was gonna do it," wrote one.

"I had an intrusive thought about stabbing the girl next to me in Spanish class with a pencil and I’m now I’m afraid to touch pencils so I can’t take notes," said another.

Another regularly worries about things like "staying awake all night because there might be a spider in my bedroom, and the spider will have babies on its back, and the babies will hatch and crawl into my mouth while I'm sleeping, and I'll suffocate and die. And then I'll go to the hell I don't believe in, because I killed the spiders."

Needless to say, people with OCD often get annoyed by the "neatness" trope which oversimplifies their disease.

However, the original poster took the criticism in stride. They're early on in their own diagnosis and discovery phase and just wanted to have a laugh to lighten the mood.

"I’m still new to my diagnosis and self-discovery within the lens of having OCD, so stepping on others’ toes or downplaying the condition was not intentional," the poster wrote. "My own OCD is not as simple as my edited page would suggest, I just posted this rather tongue-in-cheek. This page caused me some mild distress, but I also thought it hilarious that a checklist for OCD would be so rife with errors."

"My own condition is debilitating on a daily basis and doesn’t even encompass what the form made it look to be, but I didn’t quite feel the need to explain my medical journey."

It's important to have a sense of humor when things get tough. Gallows humor is the idea of using laughter to protect yourself from the stress and anxiety of a scary of even life-threatening situation. It's not everyone's style, but it's a legitimately effective coping mechanism.

As long as we can all agree that, yes, OCD is a lot more than just getting aggravated by typos — it's OK to chuckle at the sloppy medical form and OP's hilarious mark-ups. In fact, if we look past the corrections and actually read the form, we'll come away knowing way more about OCD than we did before!