how did ocd get stereotyped as wanting everything to be in a pattern or wanting everything to be straight
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Probably because it’s a tangible example, an easy access point to the larger concept. And b/c we’re all lazy, the shorthand became cannon.
It’s probably because what we see is what we understand quickly, even when it isn’t the whole picture. While OCD involves more than just the craving for order, most of its other characteristics are psychological such as agitation, hyper vigilance, social isolation, anxiety etc, and people can’t see them. So they quickly assume that what they see is all there is.
I attribute this type of anomaly (our tendency to oversimply complex matters) to the ‘human condition ‘.
Disorders in the DSM are not “natural kinds”, they’re a flux of ongoing attempts to understand and help people. It would be more remarkable if there were a long-stable definition of OCD that had been consistently communicated to the public.
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