What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [44]
For still others, when they tune into their jingle channel, what they hear is alien, repugnant, fearful, and depressing. Worse, they have a loud channel that frequently intrudes unbidden on them during work and play. Their most common themes are dirt and contamination, checking for danger, and doubt. These people have a problem called obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which is named for the two elements that make it up. Their obsession is a thought or image that recurs, and their compulsion is the ritual act performed to neutralize the thought. When thoughts of dirt dominate the jingle channel, the person will wash his hands for an hour, or scrub her baby’s room from floor to ceiling three times a day, or open doors only with her feet to avoid having her hands contaminated by the germs on the doorknob.
Howard Hughes was a brilliant tycoon. Toward the end of his life he had such severe obsessions about germs that he became a recluse. He wrote a continual stream of memos to his staff worrying about contamination and instructing them in how to prevent “back transmission” of germs to him. Hughes was wealthy and powerful enough to have an entire staff to carry out his cleaning compulsions: In one three page memo he instructed his staff in how to open a can of fruit to prevent germ “fallout”:
“The man in charge then turns the valve in the bathtub on, using his bare hands to do so. He also adjusts the water temperature so that it is not too hot nor too cold. He then takes one of the brushes, and, using one of the bars of soap, creates a good lather, and then scrubs the can from a point two inches below the top of the can. He should first soak and remove the label, and then brush the cylindrical part of the can over and over until all particles of dust, pieces of paper label, and, in general, all sources of contamination have been removed.”3
Washing and cleaning rituals can take up large swaths of the day when, unlike Hughes, you have to do them yourself. One fourteen-year-old had to wake up at four-thirty every morning in order to clean herself thoroughly and make the bed so that it was exactly right before she left for school at eight. She was plagued with the severe skin rashes and abrasions that result when you wash your hands for an hour or more at a time.
“Checkers” find themselves waking many times each night to make sure that the gas in the kitchen is off, or that all the doors and windows are locked. One man drove to a crossroads near his house ten times a day for months to make certain that there was no corpse lying there that he had run over and failed to notice on the last trip. Another woman always peered down into the toilet bowl to make sure that there was no baby in danger of being flushed away. Toilets, incidentally, are often featured on the OCD jingle channel: One otherwise successful and healthy dentist always had to flush in multiples of three—9, 27, 81, or 243 times—before carrying on. He wasn’t much fun to go drinking with.
Do you or someone you love have obsessive-compulsive tendencies? How can you tell if what you hear on your jingle channel is in the normal range or if it is in need of changing? Self-diagnosis is always hazardous, and this book is not a diagnostic manual. Rather, my intention is to alert you to a variety of problems, and if they seem to apply to you, I want to point you in the right direction for help. Some problems don’t require a lot of sophistication for you to be aware of what they are: Panic attacks and phobias are two examples. Other problems, like obsessions, require an experienced professional to diagnose. There are three problems that should alert you to a need for help:
Are the thoughts unwelcome and repugnant, and do they intrude?
Do they arise from within, with no external stimulus?
Do you find it very hard to distract yourself or dismiss the thoughts?
In addition to these hallmarks, here is a validated test:
THE MAUDSLEY OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE INVENTORY
Jack Rachman and Ray Hodgson, two of the world