Tag: Mental Health Matter

You’ve probably seen it before: a quirky TV or movie character so obsessed with tidiness, order, and perfection that other characters refer to them as being “so OCD” … and that’s the entirety of the joke. Think Monica Geller from “Friends”. While Hollywood has never been one to faithfully represent mental illnesses, its particular treatment of OCD–obsessive compulsive disorder–as a comical, cleaning-obsessed quirk has contributed to an extremely damaging stigma around the illness. This stigma not only downplays the experiences of those who struggle with this challenging disorder, but instills false ideas about what it actually means to have OCD. And while TV in particular has done a better job than in earlier decades about showing life with OCD, the road ahead to good, mainstream media representation has yet to be paved.