Do people with OCD love to clean? Are those with OCD just naturally more organized? Do they enjoy scrubbing the house from top to bottom?

A painfully common misconception about folks with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) is that their houses are spotless.

“But…what?! Isn’t OCD a cleaning disorder?“

No. Absolutely not.

It’s more complicated than you may realize. OCD isn’t a personality disorder (however, there is an extremely confusingly named disorder called “obsessive-compulsive personality disorder” that is different from OCD…how nice!). There is nothing about OCD that creates a “cleanliness” personality. There is nothing in the dysfunction of the OCD brain that somehow makes a person a natural born organizer.

OCD is categorized as an anxiety disorder, because it’s not cleanliness or a type-A personality that drive the individual, but anxiety. You may believe that OCD is all about cleaning because of Monk (trigger warning, heh). Monk and the misrepresentation of OCD is a post for another day. However, most people with OCD are not like Monk, and real OCD does not make for a good comedy-drama show.

There ARE people with OCD who keep things clean (or, their perception of clean), because their anxiety tells them that things need to be clean or else something bad will happen. This cleanliness may look like a stereotypical idea of what we consider clean, with the house vacuumed and organized and not a speck of dust on the shelf or a tchotchke out of place. This is not the norm, though.

OCD “cleanliness” often looks something more like this:

• Everything is contaminated. The floor is contaminated, so if you drop something on the floor, anywhere, it is dirty. That thing must be washed or thrown away.
• Dust is dirty. Dust may have a disease in it. Your hands need to be washed after touching dusty things.
• Anything that scratches you may have tetanus. You know that usually tetanus is found in dirt with animal waste, and you know that tetanus does not survive well in oxygen-rich, clean environments. However, you don’t want to take any risks after scratching your leg on the brand-new stool that you bought. Better wash and disinfect…and seriously consider getting your tetanus booster.
• There are so many things on the ground, but every time you pick up something off the ground, you need to wash your hands. You are TIRED of washing your hands, and they are cracked and bleeding from the constant use of soap. You leave things on the ground and plan to pick them up later….sometime later.
• You don’t want a dirty house, but you don’t want to wash your hands again. So you plan your steps. If you turn on the light switch (which is contaminated, because everyone touches it), then pick up the paper off the ground, then grab that dirty plate off the table to put in the sink, you can wash your hands afterward, and hopefully you don’t need to touch anything else for a few minutes, at least. Hopefully.
• You will clean….as long as you wear gloves, are very cognizant to not bump anything while cleaning (because germs that get on your clothes can get on you and on furniture you use and thus on other people), and can shower afterward. Heaven forbid your long hair brushes against anything dirty, and then you have to stop and wash that before it bumps you and the germs spread.
• You have a grabber tool to pick things up off the ground. Just be careful not to bump the bottom of the tool where it touches the trash. And you need to find somewhere to store the tool where the dirty part will not touch anything clean.

There are just some examples of the exhausting thought process that goes into “cleanliness” or anything related in OCD. It’s not a matter of “just cleaning”. It’s a matter of avoiding. It’s like trying to clean in a minefield. Needless to say, cleaning can take forever or simply not happen at all. Cleaning can be an overwhelming process for someone without mental illness; throw anxiety into the mix, and clean feels impossible.

In addition to mental illness, we simply have personality differences, or even co-morbid mental illnesses to further complicate things. You may have individuals with OCD who are just naturally better at cleaning, or they like things clean outside of their anxiety. You may have people with OCD who have executive dysfunction and are overwhelmed by a mess and struggle to keep things clean and organized. You may have people with OCD struggling with depression, whose emptiness steals their desire for happiness, much less a clean home. And you may even have people with OCD who are plain old lazy, with no other mental illness involved, who would rather play video games all day than lift a finger to care for their homes.

It’s actually hurtful for people who have OCD to hear things like, “I wish I had OCD! My house would be so clean!”, or to see memes that say, “I’m thinking of hosting an OCD support group…I don’t have it, but someone is bound to start cleaning.” What an awful thing to say. We shouldn’t joke about exploiting someone’s mental illness to our advantage.

Some people with OCD do have “super clean homes”, but many do not. Their clean homes may or may not be related to their OCD. But quite simply, OCD is NOT a disorder that makes you want to be clean and organized (wouldn’t it be nice if a disorder had such superpowers?!). OCD is an anxiety disorder. If you see someone with OCD who has a clean home, don’t be jealous—they may be overwhelmed by anxiety.

Or…maybe they just like to clean.