Cannot help it
Shannon Yang, 26, who works in the import-export business, says she used to have a problem with obsessive-compulsive ear picking. Every time she opened a book, she would involuntarily take out her mother's steel ear-pick, and start twiddling it inside her ears.
"Maybe the reason is that my mother used to clean my ears for me when I was a kid," Yang said. Gradually she became very addicted to it. "Reading without ear picking just feels wrong," she said.
Whenever she started picking her ears, Yang became very careful with her moves and extremely focused, and could always remember what she read, even after many years.
However, frequent picking made Yang's ears very tender and she often saw a little bit blood in them. "But even that didn't stop me. When scabs formed out of the small wounds inside the ears, I immediately started picking the scabs."
Yang clearly knew it was bad for her health, but she "couldn't control it," until one day she woke up and found blood splattered on her pillow. Yang's hearing was impaired, and she was soon taken to the hospital by her roommate.
After the accident Yang started to control her obsessive picking, but she still has a relapse from time to time. Yet Yang doesn't take the whole thing seriously, and doesn't view it as a kind of psychological disease or want to see a psychiatrist. "It's just an addiction, at most," Yang said.
As a psychiatrist, Jian has seen many clients troubled with these sorts of minor conditions seeking help. "Those are not diseases, and there are definite diagnostic criteria for each psychological disease," said Jian. For example, repeating meaningless behaviors for more than two hours a day can be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), she added.
"When having a real OCD attack, people are out of control," she said. Compared to common behaviors like repeatedly checking a lock and avoiding stepping on lines on the sidewalk, the real cases are more serious, such as taking hours to enter a door.
Like the term "phobia," people use the term OCD indiscriminately. Some claim they have a compulsion to arrange their smart phone apps perfectly by color. Some say they cannot help touching others people's stray hairs. And some have to sit in one special spot.
The first thing that one of Yang's friends has to do every time he comes home is to open the cupboard to look for snacks, even though he knows there's nothing there.
He said he has that weird habit because his mother used to put his favorite foods there for him to eat after school.
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