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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 30:1 (2025) ► pp.24–50

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I’m so OCD lol

A corpus-based study of obsessive-compulsive disorder used as an adjective

ORCiD logo with link | Independent Researcher
 | Georgia State University
Published online: 15 April 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.23081.bat
Abstract
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by recurrent thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors (compulsions) that are thought to help mitigate obsessions (American Psychiatric Association (APA). (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). One issue that has gained attention in popular discourse is the use of OCD as an adjective (e.g. I’m so OCD), which is said to trivialize the disorder (NAMI, 2015). We collected a corpus of social media comments including the phrase degree adverb + OCD. The corpus was tagged with a semantic tagger (Rayson, P., Archer, D., Piao, S. L., & McEnery, T. (2004). The UCREL semantic analysis system. In M. T. Lino, M. F. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the workshop on “Beyond named entity recognition: Semantic labelling for NLP tasks” at the 4th international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 7–12). European Language Resources Association. [URL]) to investigate the domains around the phrase. About a quarter of the 1,575 comments used the phrase to critique the popular usage of OCD as an adjective, suggesting that it is frequently negatively evaluated. The remaining genuine uses support the idea that the phrase is often used in non-medical contexts, including to express individual preferences for organization and cleanliness. We argue that this usage is negatively evaluated because it demedicalizes OCD and portrays it with a light-hearted tone.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.OCD: Controversies and contested terrain
    • 2.1OCD and its representation in media
    • 2.2OCD as an adjective and its implications for the medicalization of mental health disorders
    • 2.3Corpus-based discourse analysis of health communication
  • 3.Materials and methods
    • 3.1The sOCD corpus
    • 3.2Meta and non-meta uses of degree adverb + OCD
    • 3.3The reference corpus
    • 3.4Semantic and statistical analysis
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Frequency of degree adverb + OCD and its most frequent degree adverbs
    • 4.2Semantic analysis of non-meta degree adverb + OCD comments
      • 4.2.1Clean cars and dirty desks
      • 4.2.2Talking about OCD with a conversational style
      • 4.2.3Talking about OCD using the language of medicalization
  • 5.Conclusions
  • References
References (39)
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