Heya, thanks for the ask :)



Bumblebee: I don’t really know what OCD is, can you tell me about it?

I’m going to try and do my best to explain based on personal experience!

As you likely know, OCD stands for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Basically, sufferers have obsessions which cause them to carry out compulsions in order to alleviate the anxiety that comes with the obsessions. Obsessions usually occur when a single intrusive thought (which everyone gets from time to time) is mislabelled by your brain as a threat for whatever reason. It is an anxiety disorder, and the obsessions can cause anything from long-lasting discomfort, severe anxiety, to panic attacks, to unbearable guilt, depending on the obsession, as well as these symptoms to varying degrees. Obsessions can be about absolutely anything, although some seem to be more common than others. Sometimes there seems to be some semblance of logic to them (although they are still not appropriate worries), and sometimes they don’t make sense at all. For example, you could obsess that you didn’t lock the door properly when you left the house, so someone’s going to break in. Or you could obsess that you need to touch something a certain amount of times or someone close to you will get ill. The first case kind of makes sense (you didn’t lock the door -> someone could get in), and the second is something that doesn’t really make sense at all. But both can cause the exact same level of distress. In almost all cases, OCD sufferers will know their obsessions are nonsense, but because some sort of glitch in the brain is causing extreme anxiety, they will feel that it is real and so have to carry out the compulsion to stop it.

Compulsions are actions used to mitigate the initial anxiety. E.g. if your obsession is that you didn’t lock the door your brain will yell at you to check the door immediately, so that you don’t die. Only problem is, OCD craves certainty. So the anxiety will go down for maybe 5 minutes, but then it will ask again: “Are you sure you checked the door properly?” The anxiety goes up again and then you feel you have to check the door once again “just in case”. You get another five minutes of peace, before the OCD asks again: “Okay, you think you checked it correctly, but are you sure?” So you would have to check it again to try and get rid of the horrible feeling of dread. Or, it can move on to something else such as “Okay, you checked the door, but what about the windows?” and then the cycle continues, but the anxiety never stays away for long.

In most people without OCD, a single check of the door should reassure them that they did lock it, and they can go on with their day. But with OCD, the thought keep coming back (that’s why it’s called an obsession), and urges you to keep checking and checking to be 100% sure – which of course, is impossible to know, because you may have misremembered, you may not have touched the door correctly, maybe when you checked it last time, you accidentally unlocked it somehow, etc. etc.

That’s only one example of an obsession, but like I said, they can be about absolutely anything, and so can the resulting compulsions. Some compulsions are physical, where as others are mental. So you could get a thought that you disagree with on a moral basis, or whatever, and the compulsion could be to argue back in your head to prove that the thought isn’t true or representative of your views. But then more and more doubts crop up, leading to more having to “disprove” the thought etc. etc.

I hope that all makes sense. I feel like I ramble a lot when I try to explain stuff ^^;

Buttercup: What OCD myth do you find most annoying or most harmful?

I haven’t really spoken to many people about it irl, and I’ve often heard people online say that, when they opened up about their OCD, people would respond and be like: what? but you’re not a tidy person at all! Or things like that. There seems to be a stigma that OCD is about tidiness and cleanliness, and while it CAN be, that’s definitely not always the case. And I think some people may not realise they have OCD because their obsessions are centered around something else entirely.

Personally, the myth (if you can call it that?) that it’s “no big deal” is what I’ve found most harmful. For example, when I’ve tried to open up about it in the past, I’ve used the following example: “You’re worried you left the car unlocked, so you have to go back and check and…” and then I was immediately cut off with “Oh, yes, but everybody does that.”

That’s true – I think a lot of people without OCD may check the car door in this example, maybe even twice. But somebody with OCD would have to keep checking “just to be absolutely sure” and to try and get rid of the anxiety, and this could take a significantly long time. I don’t know if that really counts as a myth, but I think there’s a problem in that a lot of the obsessions sound so trivial (and OCD sufferers know this), that when you’re trying to explain to someone what you’re worrying about they’ll think you’re weird or stupid for worrying about something so trivial, or not being content with just checking once. Like: “Oh I’m worried that I didn’t tie my shoelaces with exactly the right amount of force when I pulled them.” Sounds stupid, we know, but thanks to the disorder, that one obsession also creates untold misery.

Marigold: Any OCD headcanons?

I’m not too confident in my Tumblr terms (sorry lol), but I would assume this question is about any characters you think may have OCD or you could see as having OCD. Personally, I’ve never really picked up on anything like that in Ace Attorney (or anything else), and I think it’s because if I’m playing games, it’s because I’m trying to get away from my obsessions if I’m in the middle of a flare-up. So like, I don’t wanna think about it lol. The only character I’ve come across who is said to have it was in a game and the big focus is more that he’s a germaphobe which is… kinda just playing into the negative stereotype lol. I could probably go deep into it and write a whole HC about how any Ace Attorney character might have OCD or whatever, but it would be more for fun (”what if they had it”) rather than because they display any traits really :)

Thanks so much for the ask! Sorry for writing an essay ^^;

And don’t worry anyone who’s looking at this like: why are you posting about OCD?? This is still an Ace Attorney blog; I just wanted to try something different and more personal lol