ocd | ocd

Apr.26.2013 What does OCD and Aspergers have to do with Jonathan Wolfman? - Our Salon Statistics tell us 26.2% of the population has been diagnosed with some sort of mental disorder in a given year. Every year 9.6% of the population is diagnosed with this affliction. According to the 2004 Census that translates to 57 million people. Of course this number is much higher...	Mar.17.2013 Living With OCD: Not Too Shabby. I finally had to look it up. Look, I'm not a doctor—don't play one on TV, radio or even the occasional podcast. The nearest I've come to adhering any semblance of the Hippocratic Oath is doing no harm to the avocados I palpate on a weekly basis at Safeway. But the deal is, those closest to me have...
Nov.10.2012 Neat The other evening I was telling a friend how, during a recent visit, my mother insisted in sitting, not in her comfortably upholstered armchair--"that's the man's chair," she told my husband, waving him into it, ignoring me--but in a harder wooden chair. When she stood up the chair slid backwards...	Nov.08.2011 My Midlife Scavenger Hunt: Anniversary Mea Culpa Clue: When your husband frames a younger man, shut up and be grateful. Our wedding anniversary is tomorrow and I have no idea what to get my husband, Jacob. It has to be something good. Something really good. Really good because he is a wonderful husband. Really good because it’s our...
Nov.02.2011 My Midlife Scavenger Hunt: Demons and Muses Midlife Scavenger Hunt Clue: Sometimes demons are muses, and in your mid-forties, like heartburn, they can no longer be ignored. I met Gloria Zimmerman, the protagonist in my novel Oxford Messed Up, during my year from hell—a year when my family, career, and sanity were severely tested....	Sep.28.2011 Perception of the Mentally Ill I was diagnosed with a mental illness last year. A mild mood disorder called dysthymia. I wondered how will people see me now that I’ve gone public with dysthymia? Will they think I’m crazy? That I need to be instutionalized? Or maybe that I’m a criminal? None of the above is true, so how is it...
Sep.21.2011 Identity Crisis I have been fortunate enough to have a successful business as a certified cat behavior consultant and also as an established author of books on cat training. It’s not unusual for me to be stopped while at the supermarket or even in the church parking lot by someone wanting advice about their...	Mar.05.2011 OCD And Writing For Vanity Fair For a double-fisted (!) dose of both excellent word-smithin' and what appears (to this humble amateur diagnostician, at least) an example of writer's obsessive-compulsive disorder, you could do far worse than to read James Wolcott's piece in the current Vanity Fair. It is entitled Morgan In...
Aug.13.2009 A most perfectly different hero Once there was a boy. There wasn’t anything particularly unusual about him when he was born, but his parents, like most parents, believed him to be the most perfect baby. He was a rough-and-tumble child, as boys tend to be — active and talkative and social. Somewhere along the way, he developed...	Mar.07.2008 My New York Times Feature What the heck is a radio guy with OCD doing writing a feature for the Dining & Wine section of the New York Times? It's a fair question. The short answer is this: shedding light on the challenges of dining out while fighting urges to wash one's hands, rearrange the tableware, report wobbly...