You will have read in The Times this week that doctors are developing new ways to spot the early signs of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder so that they can treat patients before they morph into fully fledged lightbulb-licking towel-tidiers.
Well, hurrah for that, and not a moment too soon. If this kind of help had been available earlier, we might have been spared the whole MPs’ expenses hoo-ha. Why? Because from the lips of Sir Gerald Kaufman has come a novel explanation for his alleged graspingness on the parliamentary claim form. He had to buy the £220 pair of Waterford grapefruit bowls that he claimed on expenses, you see, because he suffers from OCD.
No snide jokes about “Obsessive Claiming Disorders”, please: OCD is a distressing condition. Sir Gerald’s cleaner had smashed one of his existing crystal bowls, so he felt compelled to get two more exactly the same — one for him and one for “any guests”.
“Because I’ve got this self-diagnosed OCD, I do things according to rules that I’ve created,” he said, explaining that he must have the same breakfast whether in London or Manchester: half a grapefruit, a bowl of muesli with semi-skimmed milk and a cup of coffee with a Rich Tea biscuit. “You may think I oughtn’t to have a Waterford grapefruit dish,” says the Gorton MP, “but I do. And I ate out of it today.”
Well, put like that it’s all completely understandable. I suppose we’ll get some extreme OCD sufferer, who wet-wipes the soles of his shoes 444 times a day and believes that his wife will die if he doesn’t see three women wearing red anoraks before noon, saying that what Sir Gerald has isn’t OCD, it’s called “being a bit unimaginative with your breakfast”. But I say “rubbish”. OCD is on the rise and we know this because everyone, absolutely everyone, now claims to have it. Haven’t you noticed?
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Five years ago it was all the rage to diagnose yourself with “allergies”. At the first sign of a bloated belly you proclaimed yourself “wheat intolerant” without ever feeling the need to get this verified by a doctor; at the first itch of an eye you suddenly decided that you’d had a lifelong allergy to cats. No child in West London has come within 500 yards of a nut since 2003 because their parents believe that they may asphyxiate at the sight of a packet of Planters.
Now the vogue is to be an obsessive compulsive. “Oh, I’m definitely a bit OCD,” someone will say because they like keeping their handbag tidy. Yes, pet, and you’re also “a bit multiple sclerosis” because you sometimes get a twitchy leg. They probably don’t realise how insulting these flip pronouncements are to genuine sufferers — whose lives are wretched prisons and who can’t even walk past a police station in case they go in and confess to every unsolved murder since 1972 — because they cannot see beyond the thrill of having a named neurosis.
Not that I exclude myself here. I have in the past claimed to be OCD because more than once I’ve turned round on the motorway and gone home to check that I unplugged the hair straighteners and because I must always say “good morning” to a lone magpie. But apparently this is commonplace and not enough to make you properly OCD, just bog-standard anxious, which is dull and also has no sexy books about it that you can buy.
Real OCD afflicts only about 2 or 3 per cent of the population; people who are trying to wrest some illusion of control in an uncontrollable universe while the rest of us are probably just pampered Westerners inventing stuff to obsess over because we haven’t got enough real problems to worry about.
Jeremy Kyle, on the other hand — now there’s the real deal. In his recent autobiography, I’m Only Being Honest, he makes the grotesque admission that he is compelled to give his mobile phone a licking after it rings. Yes, that’s right — an ear-sweat-smeared Nokia. It’s the same with Jezza’s golf balls. “If I don’t clean the ball my brain feels out of balance and I’ll feel like I have cursed my round or even my whole day,” he says. “I won’t take a shot before I have licked my golf ball clean.”
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This makes David Beckham and his compulsion to straighten crockery and shove all the leaflets in a drawer out of sight when he enters a hotel room seem almost tame.
But perhaps it’s precisely because so many famous people are associated with OCD — Cameron Diaz has said that she opens doors with her elbows, Jane Horrocks once obsessed over swallowing and blinking, Leonardo DiCaprio has said that he must force himself not to step on every chewing-gum stain on the pavement, Michelangelo felt the need always to sleep in his boots — that so many ordinary people now want it, imagining that it will bestow upon them some kind of sick chic.
I admit that I feel an instinctive derision for the mask-wearers you see riding the Tube, and yet if I could wear latex gloves to press the buttons on a cash dispenser machine without looking like a loopdiloop serial killer, I would. (As it is I just use my index knuckle.) I’d also wear a bag over my head to avoid touching the headrest on a train seat and a lolly stick to push the button at a pelican crossing.
Oh yes, and can anyone advise how you exit a public toilet, post hand-wash, without touching the door handle? Because, mark my words, there are plenty of people out there who don’t wash their hands — and I know because I watch them, sometimes from behind a pillar, whimpering quietly. The best I can suggest is to wait until someone else goes first, then bolt up behind them, but that leaves the unfortunate impression that you are into frottage.
I do hope that Sir Gerald — who also submitted claims for a £225 Rollerball pen and an eight-grand telly — doesn’t find his exacting standards too troubling. I’m no expert, but it doesn’t sound like a serious problem.
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No, in the House of Commons it is not OCD with which MPs seem to be afflicted. It’s a far more common complex, often prefixed with the word “superiority”.