Charles Elliott and Laura Smith's OCD For Dummies (N1)

OCD For Dummies, by the psychologists Charles Elliott and Laura Smith, is a plain-language guide to a condition the culture badly misunderstands, one that treats obsessive-compulsive disorder as an anxiety problem rather than a quirk of neatness. Its useful starting point is that OCD sits on a continuum with ordinary worry. In a PsychCentral column Elliott writes, "The line between the worries of people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and normal concerns can be quite fuzzy." Where your everyday worry sits on that continuum is, in the Big Five, one facet.

Worry on a continuum is the Anxiety facet

That facet is Anxiety (N1), under Neuroticism, how much your mind worries and anticipates that something will go wrong. Everyone sits somewhere on it, from the rarely-rattled to the near-constantly-uneasy, which is exactly the continuum Elliott points to. OCD is what appears at the far end when that worry fastens onto a specific intrusive thought and drives a ritual to neutralize it. This is where the book earns its keep, correcting the common error that dresses OCD up as Orderliness (C2), the neat and organized side of Conscientiousness. The disorder is anxiety wearing a ritual, and this post is about the trait rather than a diagnosis, and does not replace treatment.

Treating the worry that powers it means resisting the compulsion, the check or the wash or the mental undoing that briefly calms the fear and quietly confirms it. Elliott and Smith walk readers through facing the intrusive thought and letting the discomfort pass without the ritual, which is how the alarm slowly recalibrates. Much of that is a matter of tolerating uncertainty more than any feat of willpower (C5), since the compulsion promises a certainty the world cannot actually give. The dimensional view helps here, because it frames the sufferer as far along a scale everyone is on.

For a reader placing themselves, your N1 is a fair read on how much of your day worry occupies and how insistently your mind demands certainty. High on it and OCD For Dummies is an accessible map of where ordinary worry ends and a treatable disorder begins. Low on it and the book explains a condition that can look baffling from the outside. Where you sit on Anxiety tells you how loud your worry runs, and we take the facet apart in Anxiety (N1).

Read the book: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder For Dummies by Charles Elliott and Laura Smith.

See Where You Fall

Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test

Research Citations