Some thoughts on the pandemic
Society, OCD and the question of acceptable risk
Only in a historical re-telling of the time of the pandemic will we see the true suffering of what has taken place.
I suspect that the victims of social distancing with the stress of isolation, the breakup of relationships, the loss of jobs, the constant fear of contamination, and the newfound methods of ‘cheap’ social control that governments have won through the manipulation of this fear will far outnumber those who have succumbed to the effects of the virus itself.
As a sufferer of OCD (a highly individualistic dis-order despite the well-worn tropes in the media that reduce it to a generalized caricature), I see the same effects that have plagued my life all around me. It is not the virus that is causing the most harm, but the ‘threat’ of it.
The irony is that most of the methods employed to safeguard the community are sloppy at best and it would take an OCD sufferer (with a finer attunement to the complex issue of contamination) to properly implement a more efficient system.
There is further irony in that CBT, which has become the chief resort of most mental health care professionals in treating OCD (purely as a disease) today, is built upon the therapeutic philosophy that each sufferer must arrive at a balance based on the idea of…
