2021 - UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The second edition of OCD in Society was hosted by Matthew Hiller at University of Michigan on 28-29 May 2021, and was attended by ca. 100 people. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event had to be hold online. The theme of the event was "the Future of Critical OCD Studies”. The goal was to explore how the humanities, qualitative social sciences, activism, or the arts can offer perspectives on ways to understand and raise awareness about obsessive-compulsive disorder. This conference aimed to offer a counterbalance to a predominant focus on epidemiology, assessment, and treatment within academic and clinical literature on OCD. While these approaches can offer insights on ways to address the suffering associated with OCD, they also frequently overlook the ways that people make sense of OCD in their lived experiences and how the condition is interrelated with social structures. By taking up the above theme, this conference seeks to spark conversation about ways to understand and theorize OCD from diverse viewpoints and explore how experiences of OCD can offer a critical lens on broader society.
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The event was divided into two parts, each providing a platform to explore different perspectives:
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SOCIAL PERSPECTIVES: We had two roundtables discussing issues surrounding representations of OCD in film, and the problems that can arise when being an academic with OCD; an artist gave a performance representing the tensions between experiencing OCD and autism; and two OCD advocate groups showcased their efforts to raise awareness.
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ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVES: Social scientists and humanities scholars who are doing qualitative research on OCD presented their work. Dr Sarah Orem (University of Southern California) gave a keynote lecture followed by eight academics who use qualitative approaches to study of OCD.
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Presenters' biographies and abstracts can be found below. You can also find the recordings of the individual talks on Youtube.
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ACADEMIC SPEAKERS
Dr Sarah Orem
Sarah Orem is a Lecturer in The Writing Program at the University of Southern California and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Irvine and Smith College. Her research explores the intersection of disability, gender, and race in 20th - and 21st-century American literature and performance. Orem’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, African American Review, and Disability Studies Quarterly. She is currently completing a book manuscript showing how a multi-ethnic collection of modern and contemporary American women writers are recuperating the activism of women homebound by disability and mental illness. Her research on mental illness is informed by her experience living with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
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White Genius, Black Disaster: Race in Critical OCD Studies
This talk explores how popular literature, television, and film frequently code characters with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder as white. Examining the Grey’s Anatomy character Miranda Bailey, who is played by the African American actress Chandra Wilson, as an exception to this trend, this talk shows how popular culture frames white characters with OCD as preternaturally smart and Black characters with OCD as disastrous. Ultimately, this talk argues that racialized depictions of OCD in popular culture shape the allocation of treatment services and resources across racial lines, demonstrating the necessity for critical OCD studies to engage collaboratively with the disability justice movement. You can find a transcript of Sarah's talk here.
Lucienne Spencer & Havi Carel
Lucienne Spencer is a SWW-DTP funded PhD student at the University of Bristol. Her research is on the intersection between epistemic injustice, philosophy of psychiatry and phenomenology. She is on the executive committee of the Society for Women in Philosophy UK (SWIP-UK).
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Havi Carel is a professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol. She has published on the embodied experience of illness, wellbeing within illness and patient-clinician communication in the Lancet, BMJ, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy, and in edited collections. She is the author of ‘Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger’ (2006), ‘Illness’ (2008, 2013) (shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize), and ‘Phenomenology of Illness’(2016). She has recently completed a five-year Wellcome Trust funded project entitled ‘The Life of Breath’, where she acted as senior investigator.
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"Isn’t everyone a little OCD?": the Epistemic Harms of Wrongful Depathologisation
In the philosophy of psychiatry, there is a wealth of research on the systematic mistreatment faced by people with mental health problems. Recent literature has brought to light a particularly insidious form of mistreatment that had been previously overlooked. This is epistemic injustice: the wrongful treatment of marginalised individuals qua epistemic agents. In the context of psychiatric illness, epistemic injustice occurs when ill persons are belittled, silenced or have their testimonies ignored due to prejudices that depict them as irrational, unreliable, or epistemically defective.
In our talk, we identify a new and distinct form of epistemic harm that those who suffer from OCD are particularly vulnerable to. Whereas sanist attitudes depict mentally disordered people as ‘dangerous and frightening’, ‘incompetent to participate in "normal" activities’ and ‘morally repugnant’, what we term wrongful depathologisation devalues the epistemic status of the mentally disordered by reducing their symptoms to mere personality traits, thus denying sufferers a fully recognised psychiatric identity. One manifestation of wrongful depathologisation is the de-prioritisation of psychiatric patients in favour of ‘patients who are really ill’. Another manifestation is the characterisation of persons with a mental disorder as ‘just like everyone else’ yet labelled as ‘difficult’ ‘manipulative’ or ‘attention-seeking’.
We argue that wrongful depathologisation involves simultaneously stigmatising and trivialising a mental disorder and that therein lies its harmfulness. This creates a twilight zone of mental disorder, where the ill person is deemed to both exaggerate their difficulties (trivialisation) and to be epistemically suspect because of their psychiatric diagnosis (stigmatisation). In other words, while the individual is stigmatised for belonging to the marginalised community of ‘the mentally ill’, their disorder itself is subject to trivialisation. Through this talk, we use OCD as a paradigmatic example of how this process can occur.
You can read the full article of this talk here.
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Eva Surawy Stepney
Eva Surawy Stepney is a White Rose Arts and Humanities Research Council funded PhD candidate in the University of Sheffield History Department. Her research consists of a historical analysis of OCD in mid to late twentieth-century British clinical psychology, and what it can tell us about ideas of 'evidence' and therapeutics in psychology more broadly.
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Washing and Checking: the production of ‘compulsive rituals’ in 1970s British Psychology -
The Primacy of Compulsive Behaviour: OCD and the Politics of Exclusion
Contemporary literature on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) constitutes itself around two key concepts: ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’. Whilst a diagnosis can be given based on the existence of both, or either, of these symptoms, it is generally agreed these ‘more common’ and overt forms of OCD (washing and checking behaviours) are well recognised by clinicians, whilst less common forms of OCD (internal ‘obsessions’) may remain unrecognised sometimes for many years. This paper will make two interrelated points. Firstly, it will demonstrate that the conjunction between ‘obsessions’ and ‘compulsions’- as two distinct but related concepts, did not make sense prior to the early 1980s. The differentiation of these concepts, and their placement on a thought/behaviour binary, was established through a series of experimental studies conducted at South London’s Institute of Psychiatry and Maudsley Hospital in the early to mid 1970s. Secondly, it will show how these 1970 studies expounded considerable experimental and intellectual effort in order to establish a stable concept of ‘compulsive behaviour’- shortened to ‘compulsions’. This effort foregrounded psychiatric inpatients with ‘washing’ and ‘checking’ behaviour, whilst excluding individuals with obsessive ‘ruminations’- who were considered beyond the grasp of existing behavioural models. When ‘osbessional ruminations’ were eventually returned to a stable model of ‘compulsions’ had already been established, which was subsequently mapped on to internal processes. The current phenomenon of OCD (as made up of obsessions and compulsions) is thus shown to be a relatively recent invention, and a highly specific historical object. The decision to designate non-observable behaviours as outside the initial realm of enquiry (as ‘additional’) facilitated the primacy of observable ‘compulsions’ as the archetypal characteristic of modem understandings of OCD- in cultural and non-specialist clinical settings.
Olivia Knapton
Olivia Knapton is a Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London. Her research investigates the ways in which people with mental health problems (in particular OCD, anxiety disorders and eating disorders) give meaning to their experiences through the everyday stories they tell.
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Women’s Experiences of Bodily Trauma and the Onset of OCD
Quantitative studies have found that women with OCD are more likely than men with OCD to have obsessions about germs, contamination and illness (e.g. Labad et al, 2008). Despite this finding, there is a lack of qualitative work on how women’s subjective experiences of OCD may relate to their experiences, perceptions and beliefs about their bodies. This presentation combines the cognitive linguistic theory of image schemas (Johnson, 1987) with approaches from illness narrative analysis (e.g. Bury, 1982) to explore how women with OCD link the onset of the disorder to unwanted and traumatic changes in their bodies, such as illness, accidents, puberty or pregnancy. Through a presentation of three case studies, it is argued that bodily changes can disrupt the conceptualisations that provide stable, coherent understandings of the body. The disintegration of the stable body leads to conceptualisations of OCD onset that, to various degrees, frame OCD as an attempt to regain control over the changed body. It is also shown how the women make sense of OCD onset through stories that connect OCD to personal crises that are embedded within specific sociocultural contexts. It is discussed how these subjective framings of OCD provide an alternative to medical framings that position the disorder as cognitive or biological dysfunctions.
You can read the article of this talk here.
Poppy Plumb
Poppy Plumb is a postgraduate linguist who has been living with OCD since 2010. She is studying for an MA in Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, where she will also be starting her Linguistics PhD later this year (funded by the ESRC). She’s interested in how people with mental illnesses talk about their experiences and how we can involve stakeholders in applied linguistics research.
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Mad Linguistics: A Corpus-Based and Service-User Informed
Critical Discourse Analysis of Online OCD Forums
In this paper, I present the initial rational for my upcoming PhD thesis provisionally titled ‘Mad Linguistics: A corpus-based and service-user informed critical discourse analysis of online Obsessive Compulsive Disorder forums’. The language used by OCD sufferers to describe their experiences has been previously researched regarding their use of metaphor (Campbell & Longhurst, 2013; Knapton and Rundblad, 2018) and how they construct themselves in OCD narratives (Knapton, 2018). Coimbra-Gomes (2020) has used corpus approaches to discourse analysis, or the use of computer software in the analysis of linguistic patterns of language use, to analyse stance-taking in OCD with sexual orientation themes. My proposed research builds on this application of corpus linguistics by studying online OCD forums using corpus approaches to critical discourse analysis. This methodological approach may help to better understand the lived experiences of sufferers by critically examining the discursive practices used to communicate about their experiences (Hunt and Brookes, 2020). While corpus-approaches to critical discourse analysis have gained traction in applied linguistics, I propose that this methodology can also involve service-users in the data analysis to guide the research towards areas of enquiry that are important for stakeholders. As a researcher with lived experience of OCD, and by regularly consulting with a focus group of service-users, I will adopt a service user-informed approach that prioritises those with lived experience, and therefore those with ‘experiential knowledge’ (Faulkner, 2012). This is in the spirit of Mad Studies that seeks to foreground lived experience and, in some cases, question dominant (often medical) models of understanding mental distress. Although I am yet to begin my PhD, I invite those with lived experience of OCD and researchers (or indeed those where both apply) to offer constructive criticism as I develop this research.
Amadea Martino Smith
Amadea Martino Smith is a rising senior at Johns Hopkins, majoring in Anthropology. As someone with OCD, she is interested in understanding OCD as both a social construct and a lived experience through anthropological inquiry and personal reflection. In November of 2019, Amadea presented her research on trauma titled “When Trauma No Longer Disqualifies: Examining the Institutional Universality of Traumatic Experience at a Workforce Nonprofit” at Johns Hopkins University’s Trauma, Narratives, Institutions: Transdisciplinary Dialogues conference. She published this research in the Macksey Journal of Johns Hopkins University in December 2020. In her free time, Amadea likes to hand throw bowls in the ceramic studio and work as a certified personal trainer.
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“Welcome to My World” — Validating OCD through the COVID-19 Pandemic
Exploring how the experiences of OCD intersect with those of the COVID-19 pandemic offer an opportunity to move away from conceptions of OCD as tied up in diagnostic, academic, or stigmatized modalities. During the COVID-10 pandemic, many aspects of life have become anomalies from typical ideal life. Thus, to take up something often sadly depicted as irrational or atypical—such as OCD—during a time of extreme abnormalcy—such as the COVID-19 pandemic—may allow us to liberate ourselves from dominant medicalized, technocratic, and alienating perspectives of OCD. I explore how the collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic—the “hygiene theatre,” changing public health recommendations, the mobilization of the virus as the “enemy”—moves on a line with similar pivots as the experience of contamination-based OCD—the presumed “irrationality” of fear of germs, the psychological treatment of OCD as the “enemy,” the teleological nature of exposure therapy. How might we translate the current broadly-felt and socially-acceptable concern about germs during this pandemic into validation of the experience and etiology of OCD beyond traditional diagnostic criteria and risk factors? Through observation of OCD chat rooms and Facebook groups, testimony from OCD treatment providers, and reflection on my personal experiences with OCD, I find that the conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic have simulated parts of the quotidian experience of those with contamination OCD. People without any previous preoccupations with germs may find themselves transported to the world of “germ-fearing long-haulers,” and for the first time, be able to truly empathize with OCD sufferers. Understanding the mechanisms by which germ-based fear among those without OCD during the COVID-19 pandemic has become socially and medically validated in certain ways offers the ability to view OCD as a logical reaction to a world filled with uncertainty, contradictory notions of germs and health, and seemingly omnipresent risks of being human.
Hollie Burton
Hollie Burton is a Population Health PhD student at the University of Oxford in the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit under the supervision of Paul Salkovskis, Fiona Alderdice and Claire Carson. She has been studying OCD for the last 5 years, this began during her final year of her undergraduate in Psychology during a module titled “The Neurobiology of Mental Illness” which was a fundamental turning point in her academic journey. She then went on to study an MSc Health Research where she focussed on looking at the experiences of pregnancy for women with already pre-existing OCD (work which she presented at the OCD in Society Conference in 2019). Her research now focuses on the experiences of maternity and mental health care and treatment during pregnancy and postpartum for women with OCD. Hollie has both an academic interest in OCD and a personal one, as she was diagnosed with OCD when she was 17.
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What Are the Experiences of Mental Health Care and Maternity Care for Women with OCD
during Pregnancy/Postpartum? A Mixed Methods Systematic Review
Background: Women are at particular risk of developing or experiencing an exacerbation of existing Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (1) (OCD) during pregnancy and in the year after birth. Approximately 1 in 50 of pregnancies in the UK are complicated by OCD (1). If left untreated, OCD can have lasting and severe impacts on both mother (2) and baby (3). There are significant barriers to and fragmentation (4) of the links between maternity services and mental health services. It is important to understand the experiences of maternity and mental health care among women who develop or already have OCD in order to inform ways of improving outcomes for both mother and baby. To date, there are no systematic reviews addressing the experiences of mental health care and maternity care for women with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder during pregnancy/postpartum.
Method: A systematic literature search was completed in November 2020 to identify all papers describing qualitative or quantitative studies that looked at the experiences of treatment or care for women with OCD during pregnancy or postpartum. The proposal was registered by PROSPERO and can be found here: https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=219016 Procedure: 1561 publications were identified, and then screened by two independent researchers, initially via abstract and then full text. Data were extracted using a predetermined extraction protocol and a risk of bias assessment was completed, and a thematic analysis was conducted.
Results: 13 papers were included. These results will be summarised and I will provide a synthesis of the main themes related to women’s experiences. I will also discuss the quality of the included studies. Discussion: the findings from the existing research will be discussed in the context of the importance of researching women’s experience, what this means for care pathways and the priorities for perinatal OCD research, including my own research.
Joseph La Torre
Joseph La Torre, MTS is currently completing his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology under Dr. Monnica Williams, Ph.D., ABPP at the University of Ottawa. Prior to beginning his doctoral work, Joseph completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology with a minor in Religious Studies at Merrimack College, followed by living in Nepal on a Fulbright grant for a year and living in China’s most ethnically and religiously diverse province, Yunnan, for a year and a half. After his time abroad, Joseph returned to his home city of Boston to complete his Masters of Theological Studies with a concentration in Buddhist Studies at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he was a Dean’s Fellow. While at Harvard University, Joseph focused on esoteric Buddhism, material religion, Asian medicine, Tibetan, Chinese, and the ways in which Buddhist psychology interfaces with Western understandings of the psyche. His research interests span anxiety, psychosis, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, spirituality, and culturally informed assessment and treatment. He has published in several journals including Psychological Inquiry, the Journal of Educational Computing Research, and the Cognitive Behavior Therapist.
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Culturally Informed Assessment and Treatment of OCD
This article’s purpose is to lay out several practitioner guidelines surrounding culturally informed assessment and treatment for clients of colour with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It recommends employing anti-racist and multicultural approaches to psychotherapy with diverse clients by highlighting ethnic, racial, and religious differences, as well as emphasisizing the role of culture in shaping the presentation of OCD symptoms. Several recommendations are given to help clinicians differentiate between normative behaviour from behaviour that is psychopathological, and consultation of family members, friends, and community members is encouraged when treating a client from a group they are unfamiliar with. A conversation around cross-cultural OCD phenomenology, ethnocultural differences in symptom manifestation, and mental health literacy differing across cultural groups is also covered. The article additionally delineates the clinical implications of clients’ endorsement of traditional views of wellness and complementary medicine, valuation of traditional and/or spiritual healers, and explanatory models of illness. A discussion of violating client values, and invalidating beliefs and traditions during Cognitive-behavioural Therapy (CBT) is also expected to be of value to clinicians treating communities of colour. Finally, suggestions for how clinicians can help clients from diverse populations overcome a variety of obstacles and challenges faced in the therapeutic context, including stigma and cultural mistrust are given. Some key learning aims of the study include promoting awareness around OCD, surveying OCD’s place around the world and throughout different cultures and religions, teaching about OCD disparities, and educating on how cultural context, ethnic background, and endorsement of specific religious traditions lead to symptomatically variant presentations. The article is also intended to identify best practices for culturally informed assessment and treatment. Several guidelines around appropriate Exposure and Ritual Prevention Therapy (Ex/RP) and explanations on how exposures usually do not cause clients with scrupulosity concerns to commit a sin are also given.
Stuart Ralph
Stuart Ralph is an integrative counsellor and psychotherapist in training for children and young people at the University of Roehampton, London. Stuart holds a masters degree in psychological therapies from the University of London, Queen Mary. He runs The OCD Stories podcast which has been downloaded over 3 million times. In 2018 the International OCD Foundation gave him the hero award for his advocacy services. He runs an annual OCD camp in the UK for adults affected by OCD.
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Brief Humanistic Counselling with an Adolescent Client Experiencing Obsessive-Compulsive Difficulties: 
A Theory Building Case Study 
This research investigates whether brief humanistic counselling has any effect on a young person’s obsessive-compulsive difficulties. Using a mixed methods theory building case study approach, the study explores what was effective, and what was not. The case was extracted from the ETHOS study.
The ETHOS study is a randomised control trial (Cooper et al., 2021) which looked at the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of brief humanistic counselling in British high schools, versus pastoral care as usual. 329 young people were recruited for the study, with 167 (51%) randomly prescribed school based humanistic counselling, alongside pastoral care as usual.
Humanistic counselling, as defined in the ETHOS study, is based on the work of Carl Roger’s (1957) ‘necessary and sufficient’ conditions for change. With the core belief that people are naturally motivated towards psychological growth.
The research focus is on whether brief humanistic counselling impacts Obsessive-Compulsive difficulties in adolescence. And what can be learned from this single case to improve future research around humanistic counselling for young people affected by OCD. To date, there has been zero studies investigating the effectiveness of humanistic counselling for OCD on any age group. With Exposure and Response Prevention therapy (ERP) currently being the gold standard intervention for OCD, but with 50-70% of people receiving symptom reduction. More research needs to be conducted into how to improve on the existing wealth of knowledge. This should include other therapies, such as humanistic counselling, initially as a standalone treatment, and then in combination with ERP.
In this presentation Stuart will share his preliminary findings from this single case.
OCD ADVOCATES & ARTISTS
NOT ALONE NOTES
Morgan Rondinelli & Molly Fishback
Morgan Rondinelli is a mental health blogger (myocdvoice.com) and co-founder of the nonprofit, Not Alone Notes. She is working towards her MFA in creative and professional writing, and is a University of Michigan 2018 alumna in biology.
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Molly Fishback is a teacher and co-founder of the OCD nonprofit Not Alone Notes. She works at McLean Hospital’s Arlington School as an apprentice teacher. Molly enjoys being a mental health advocate through Not Alone Notes. When not teaching or advocating for mental health awareness, Molly likes to make art, listen to podcasts, and hang out (but now Facetiming) with friends.
Not Alone Notes is a nonprofit that mails handwritten notes to others with OCD and related disorders. It began in 2017 in a University of Michigan dorm room, with the simple idea of sending out letters to others with OCD and helping them feel less alone. We have since grown, and with our team, we have mailed over 1,500 notes around the world. Each note is on a handmade card and also contains a list of OCD-related resources. Other projects have included writing and illustrating a self-published exposure therapy coloring book, Color Your Fears. This past year, we began the initiative, Not Alone Totes, a project to mail a tote bag full of resources specifically for individuals new to the OCD diagnosis or treatment journey. Join us to hear about the formation and development of this organization, lessons learned in advocacy, and ideas for the future. Instagram: @notalonenotes
A Penny for Your Intrusive Thoughts
A Penny for Your Intrusive Thoughts shares people’s anonymously submitted intrusive thoughts with the goal of helping people with OCD see that they are not alone. Our website links to an anonymous Google Form where people can submit intrusive thoughts for us to post across our platforms. Visit our website to learn more and to read people’s anonymously-submitted intrusive thoughts.
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Taboo Intrusive Thoughts: Shifting the Conversation Through Anonymity
Experiencing intrusive thoughts can feel isolating and our goal is to do exactly what shame tells us we can’t do: talk about it. Anonymity not only gives us the power to begin these conversations, but allows us to include those who otherwise would not feel comfortable sharing. Allowing for anonymity is key to making space for the voices of people who feel the stigma the most. Through our organization, A Penny For Your Intrusive Thoughts, we use anonymity to reveal how common taboo OCD themes are, even though people often struggle to talk about them publicly. As a panel, we will share our lived experiences in navigating these themes, and we will investigate the unique challenges that arise when we feel unsafe openly discussing the nature of our intrusive thoughts. We will then include an opportunity for attendees to anonymously share their own questions and thoughts related to taboo OCD themes. We aim to spread the message that anyone can be an advocate and that not all advocacy has to be big. By anonymously submitting their intrusive thoughts to our project, individuals with OCD help others tremendously without even sharing their names.
Sumita Unjumbled
Sumita Majumdar is an autistic arts-maker currently studying an MSc in Creative Arts and Mental Health at Queen Mary University of London. Their interests include the use of inner imagination-characters as a tool for mental wellness. As Sumita Unjumbled, she writes as a way of hearing, expressing, accepting and laughing at the various things going on in their mind, whilst thinking about neurodiversity, normotypes, brain-things and being-ness. Sumita has voice-acted in and co-written stories for ‘Pablo’, a CBeebies TV show about an autistic child who uses an inner art world to process, play and understand.
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“OCD-experiences, when I call them OCD-experiences” -
Permission to Relate to OCD, Alongside my Personal Normoreality
Sumita is a brown, autistic arts-maker/researcher, who uses music shapes and words to unjumble her inner-mind processing, which is a continuous process of observing through the multiple frameworks that my experiences overlap. Sumita was diagnosed autistic as an adult, and self-identifies with various mental health experiences, including OCD. Whilst their jumbled experiences offer their self mind-management tools, such as the symbiotic co-existance of conflicting mind-things, the overlaps significantly affects access to diagnosis and/or significant support due to never-quite-fitting-in-‘enough’, or being divergent from the representative ‘norm’. This normodivergentness, which includes Sumita's mixed brown culture and autisticness, further confuses the internal fight of deciphering/deciding between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’, which can complicate managing, understanding and accepting OCD. She is interested in observing the way OCD and autisticness interrelate - how OCD-related inner-mind experiences develop within and envelope around her autistic processing and Beingness, when Sumita decides that they are OCD-related, and the effect that stating they are OCD-related has on the re-internalisation of the experiences. The development of the inner-mind narratives that she chooses, or not, to believe as realities, affects perceptions of wellness - her own, and others about her, which interferes with how Sumita allows herself to Be. Sumita will explain how creativity allowed them to see her experiences through an OCD framework: songwriting enabled them to communicate their experiences in a shareable format, and when OCD experiences appeared they were recognised and identified as being so. Whilst not necessarily seeking a diagnosis, having permission to relate to the diagnostic label allows Sumita to better navigate her OCD-experiences, when she call them OCD-experiences, alongside her normoreality.
ROUNDTABLE:
BEING AN ACADEMIC WITH OCD
In a profession where detail and precision is extremely essential, OCD can for some academics interfere with their research. To discuss the challenges of being an academic with OCD (and researching about OCD), Eva Stepney, and Hollie Burton were joined by:
Adhip Amin
Adhip Amin is a public health researcher based in Bangalore. His research interests are in the areas of the history and anthropology of public health and urban spaces. Adhip was diagnosed with the category of OCD in 2016 when he was 22 years old – and much of his life has since revolved around his experience with living with what is categorised as OCD. He has approached OCD not only historically and anthropologically, but has also sought to emplace OCD as a heuristic to understand what he believes permeate most 'social' questions such as purity and danger, cartographies of the Law and the production of binaries, processes of naturalisation and totality, the relationship between the symbolic and material, embodiment and performativity, the close association between healing and violence, how rituals make, unmake and re-make selves, among other similar inquiries.
ROUNDTABLE:
REPRESENTING OCD IN FILM
OCD is very often portrayed in TV shows or movies as a humerous disorder (e.g., Monk, As Good As It Gets, The Big Bang Theory). This roundtable explored the challenges in representing an invisible psychiatric disorder on the white screen.
Chris Baier
Chris Baier is a parent of a teenager with OCD. Over the past few years, he has used his affiliation with producing UNSTUCK: an OCD Kids Movie to advocate for those with OCD around the world. He created OCDeconstruct, a global, virtual OCD Conference in 2019.
Robert Lemelson
Dr. Robert Lemelson is an adjunct professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and a research anthropologist in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviorat UCLA. He is also a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. A former Fulbright scholar, he has been conducting psychological and visual anthropological research in Indonesia, on the islands of Bali and Java, yearly for the past 25 years. His work has appeared in prestigious journals and he is also the co-editor of three volumes with Cambridge University Press. Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives (Kirmayer, Lemelson, & Barad, 2007), Re-Visioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience, and Global Mental Health (Kirmayer, Lemelson, & Cummings, 2015), and Culture, Mind, Brain: Emerging Concepts, Models, Applications (Kirmayer, Worthman, Kitayama, Lemelson, & Cummings, forthcoming). In 2007 he founded Elemental Productions, an ethnographic documentary film production company. He has produced and directed over a dozen award winning ethnographic films on subjects ranging from genocide, the sex trade, mental illness, kinship, ritual, neurodiversity, trance and possession and related topics. Dr. Lemelson co-authored with Dr. Anne Tucker, Afflictions: Steps Toward a Visual Psychological Anthropology (2017), published by Palgrave Macmillan.