Walking into Butler library to finish her homework for the night, Graciela will head to her lucky room to find a seat. She turns the pages slowly in her books, reading the last sentence of each page three times. Writing papers for class proves difficult as she struggles to make each line perfect.
“I’ve actually turned things in late rather than allow them to be less than perfect,” she admits. Her thoroughness is deeply ingrained: it is a symptom of the obsessive-compulsive disorder that she has been diagnosed with for the past twelve years.
Graciela, who asked to be quoted under a pseudonym because she does not want her professors to know about her condition, is now a sophomore in Columbia College. She has taken medication for OCD since the fifth grade, to help control the compulsions associated with the condition as well as related depression and general anxiety.
Her OCD does more than simply affect her study habits. “I think it actually plays a big role in my identity,” she said, explaining that OCD impacts nearly every aspect of her daily life. Her compulsions dictate things like which parts of campus she walks through at different times of the day, the way that she arranges her belongings, and a need to remember what time it is when she leaves her room. “OCD is a very time-consuming thing,” she explained. “I think people don’t realize how it can take hours to do a task.”
On the other hand, sometimes OCD symptoms don’t seem so different from everyday routine. To some extent, OCD can be seen as “a magnified version of what everyone else does,” Graciela said. “Because everyone has lucky rooms in Butler,” she added.
OCD has affected Graciela’s relationships with others, too. Living in the college dorms, she said, “people will start to notice when you’re doing odd things, and it’s kind of awkward.” Still, at Columbia, she said, she has generally found an environment aware of and supportive of mental-health issues. “It’s funny because I think as soon as you say you have a mental health issue, [other students] would come out with their own.”
But she recounted one experience when a professor seemed far from accommodating to her needs relating to mental health. “She was really nasty when she made me explain the reason why I was taking an incomplete [for the course],” she said, adding that the professor later sent a much more understanding email.
Graciela finds it “kind of problematic” that a mental disorder can play such an important part in a person’s identity. “Especially when you’ve had something for so long, with chronic mental illness, it becomes a part of who you are and it becomes really hard to treat. A lot of it is so deeply ingrained that to try to think differently, I almost think, ‘It’s not me,’” she said.
It can be hard for Graciela to see OCD as both part of her identity and something that requires treatment. “It is a part of my identity but it’s something consistently identified as being distorted, or wrong, or different,” she said.
‘IT WOULD BE WEIRD NOT TO HAVE OCD’
An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older—about one in four adults—suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The ways that people with mental disorders think of their conditions vary as much as the symptoms themselves. Mary Commerford, director of Barnard’s Furman Counseling Center, explained, “Identity development is a personal process, and nobody can prescribe what is the wrong way or the right way.”
Twenty-four percent of the Barnard student body visited Furman last year, according to Commerford. “For some, [mental illness] is a huge part of identity, for some it’s not. ... It may be central, or it may be compartmentalized,” Commerford said. The many psychiatric illnesses registered with the Office of Disability Services—“tons,” according to Commerford—include temporary and long-term conditions.
For the last three months Caroline, a CC junior, has been taking Prozac for depression and OCD—conditions that she says she has dealt with all her life. She started to see a therapist the summer before college. Caroline says that she doesn’t necessarily mind telling others about her mental health. “If anyone asked me in person, I’d tell them all the details,” she said. But quoted in print, Caroline said she felt pressured to use a pseudonym to protect her privacy from strangers.
Caroline doesn’t think that the impact of OCD on her daily life is as strong as it can be for others affected. “Other people have it much worse,” she emphasized. It bothers her to hear others talk about mental illness casually. She said she hates it “when people say, ‘Oh, I’m being OCD right now,’ when it isn’t true.”
Caroline does see her mental health as a part of her identity. “I call myself crazy as an affectionate term, and so do my friends,” she said.
“It would be weird not to have OCD,” she said. “I don’t necessarily want to lose it, it’s a part of myself.”
‘I’M REALLY STRONG’
Stella, a CC junior who uses a pseudonym so that future employers cannot disqualify her if they find her comments by means of a Google search, has been diagnosed with depression and more recently with bipolar disorder. She thinks of feelings associated with bipolar disorder, like spells of intense sadness, as “a part of me rather than a symptom of the illness.”
Stella struggled with her mental health in high school and now sees a therapist and takes daily medication. She has seen five mental-health professionals since her first year of college and has received multiple diagnoses. She has trouble accepting the idea of diagnostic labels that seem to categorize symptoms as pertaining to specific illnesses. “My [current] psychiatrist doesn’t really talk about diagnoses and I really like that about her,” Stella said. “It’s a lot more appropriate to deal with people on a case-by-case basis.”
Stella does not mind discussing her mental health with close friends, but few people know that she was institutionalized for a week—a time that she calls her lowest point. “I don’t talk about being institutionalized,” she said. “I think that people would treat me differently if they knew about it. Like I’m really fragile or something, and I’m not. I’m really strong.”
Her feelings about her diagnoses are conflicted, and have changed over time. “On the one hand it made me feel kind of more isolated because now I was thinking of myself as a person who had some kind of disease ... it made me feel kind of bad. But at the same time, it was kind of comforting, because it was an explanation for the negative feelings I was having,” she said.
Medication seemed somewhat counterintuitive to Stella, who said, “I was really hesitant about starting medication because the negative feelings that I was having felt really natural and a part of who I was rather than symptoms of some kind of disease.”
“When I was diagnosed as being bipolar, I kind of thought it was cool because I’m in the company of all these great creative people,” Stella added. “But that was before I started being skeptical of how hard and fast these diagnoses are. ... I don’t know if an exact science ever could be developed.”