#I don't have. rituals? to prevent the things? but oh boy if i have Bad thought it sure is hard to not. obsess. over trying to Do Better

[dragonlights]

Are. Are semi-frequent bouts of intense self doubt about your gender, sexuality, and feelings about people in your life not normal anxiety things?

... What about the intense anxiety of seeing creepy things in mirrors. This is all just overlap with anxiety right? Right?????

[gentil-minou]

Random but do you ever see any OCD traits in mlb characters? I’m diagnosed with it and was wondering…

also I LOVE your content 💕

Thank you for your kind words!!! And sorry it's taken so long to respond to this. I have to admit, I don't do as much work with OCD (my specialty is Anxiety, Depression, and PTSD and working on getting better at ADHD) so I wanted to make sure I was informed well enough to talk about this topic.

OCD tends to be tougher to diagnose (for me at least) because it is characterized by intrusive thoughts leading to obsessions and compulsive behavior, often resulting in rituals to avoid any anxiety associated with it. It's an anxiety disorder, so there is a lot of overlap between them which is where I kind of struggle a bit with because anxious thoughts are a bit hard for me to distinguish from intrusive thoughts.

The challenge with ML is that we cannot hear the charcter's thought often enough to see "oh this is OCD and not general anxiety." Typically if I had a client in session we would go through a serious of questions and discussion to figure out what is going. Since we can't do that, we have to rely on what we see in the show.

The first person who came to mind was Gabe, especially in Backwarder with his aversion to human contact and also maybe his near disdain for being outside amongst people. The issue is we don't know what his thoughts are, so it could be because he's got OCD or because he's a dick. Plus he sucks so asfjhdjkf

I didn't like that answer so I asked for someone else's opinion and @galahadwilder mentioned Marinette also has some OCD tendencies!!!!

He made a good point that OCD is also characterized by "an extreme form of anxiety that leads to performing irrational rituals in order to prevent perceived bad outcomes"

And he also pointed out that Marinette's obsession might be Chat Blanc and that led me to think that Marinette's need to be in control of every situation, miraculous or not could be attributed to OCD.

For instance, her 1001 ways to care for your cat boy could have been played up for laughs but also could have been her need to keep thing in control or in check. Keeping track of important dates in a calendar, preparing for all of Adrien's birthdays, bringing as many things as possible to be prepared for any situation, and even the near paranoia in Mr Pigeon 72 could all be as a result of an intrusive thought like, "If I don't have control of everything or if I'm not prepared something is going to terribly wrong"

So Mari has some interesting presentations that could be attributed to OCD, but they could also be due to GAD, PTSD, ADHD, ASD, etc. because the joy of therapy is all the overlap (read: sarcasm xD)

That's part of what makes her such a fun character to explore!!!! She has so many multi-dimensional facets that make it so much fun to explore her character and mindset. And although we might not get concrete evidence to support any diagnosis, we can headcanon anything we want hehe :)

Hope that is somewhat satisfactory!!! Again, OCD is not my expertise but if you have any other thoughts or want to share your experience I'd love to hear and learn! And @galahadwilder please add if there's anything else you think I missed or correct me if I made any mistakes!!!!