OCD and OCPD can get confusing for a lot of reasons, including how similar their names are. When we start to differentiate OCD vs perfectionism, it becomes a little more clear. Still, both mental illnesses are so similar that it can easily get confusing.
In this blog, we discuss three key differences between OCD and OCPD. We aim to give you a better idea about which symptoms and characteristics to look out for in yourself and others.
Plus, we provide a brief overview of each of them to give you context before we dive in with all of the details.
This post is all about OCD vs perfectionism.
Disclaimer
When asking yourself if you may have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, it’s important to always seek professional help. Self-diagnosis is dangerous and typically unreliable because it relies on anecdotal evidence.
Mental health clinicians undergo training to identify symptoms and the best diagnosis or diagnoses to fit those symptoms. If you feel overwhelmed by the possibility of determining whether you have OCD or OCPD, also known as perfectionism, that makes sense.
Even trained clinicians should not rely on the diagnoses they give themselves. The fact is that only someone on the outside has a truly unbiased perspective to help you move forward, with or without a label.
What is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is marked by the presence of obsessions and compulsions (see the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5-TR for detailed criteria).
It is classified as an anxiety disorder due to the intense anxiety experienced during OCD episodes. If you have OCD, you might frequently encounter distressing thoughts, known as obsessions.
These obsessions lead to compulsions, which are actions you feel compelled to perform in response to these thoughts. In individuals with OCD, these compulsions aim to alleviate the significant distress and intense anxiety caused by obsessions and ongoing intrusive thoughts.
Interestingly, these compulsions often lack a logical connection to the obsessions and rarely affect them. For example, you might obsess over the fear of harming your family with a kitchen knife, even if you live far away from them.
This illogical nature is a common feature of OCD obsessions. Consequently, you might feel compelled to lock and unlock your door thirty times each morning.
OCD symptoms include persistent thoughts and repetitive behaviors intended to reduce the anxiety they provoke. These compulsive behaviors are usually time-consuming and significantly interfere with daily life.
What is Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder?
Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD) is marked by a pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and control (see the DSM-5-TR for detailed criteria).
These symptoms severely limit an individual’s flexibility, openness, and efficiency. People with OCPD often see their way of functioning as correct and necessary.
This is often reinforced by the positive outcomes that come from their perfectionist tendencies. For example, you may score well on an assignment or get praise from a supervisor at work. One key feature of OCPD includes an excessive focus on rules, details, and schedules.
This leads to an overall loss of the major point of activities. Another is setting unrealistically high standards resulting in dissatisfaction and difficulty completing tasks. Lastly, people with OCPD show an excessive devotion to work at the expense of leisure and relationships.
Individuals with OCPD may exhibit rigidity in beliefs, an inability to delegate tasks, hoarding behaviors, a miserly spending style, and a general resistance to change as well as a preference for established routines.
It’s important to understand OCPD. This is true for both individuals who might be affected and those around them. OCPD can significantly impact personal and professional relationships when not understood or recognized.
OCD VS PERFECTIONISM:
1. OCD focuses on obsessions and compulsions vs. OCPD focuses on preoccupation and perfectionism
Reading through the symptoms of OCD and OCPD is one thing. It’s another thing entirely to understand how obsessions differ from preoccupations. People with OCD often feel compelled to complete ritualistic behaviors.
In theory, compulsions like these alleviate some of the intense anxiety they experience from their obsessive thoughts. For example, someone with anxiety may obsess over the idea they may accidentally place their hand into a jar of peanut butter.
Maybe they think they’ll then cook for their partner, who has a nut allergy, without washing their hands. In this case, they may be compelled to wash their hands several times in a row regardless of whether they’ve touched the peanut butter at all.
Someone with OCPD, on the other hand, is preoccupied with rigidity and order. They have a pattern of needing extreme perfectionism and complete control. People with OCPD are often preoccupied with perfecting everything they do.
This often leads to feelings of uncertainty when something can ever truly be completed because their high standards are impossible to attain in actuality.
An example of this is someone with OCPD re-writing an email several times and still wondering whether the email is satisfactory. It’s worth noting that both mental illnesses can cause high levels of anxiety.
2. People with OCD are more aware of their mental illness vs. people with OCPD are less aware
Both mental health issues cause much distress to the people who deal with them. However, people with OCD are more likely to be aware that their distress is caused by a mental illness.
For people with OCPD, their distress aligns with their self-image, making it harder for them to detect the problem. Self-image refers to the idea we have of ourselves, who are, and our identities and it plays an important role in mental health.
OCD can cause people to experience unwanted thoughts that directly contradict or cause them to question their self-image. Let’s continue with our peanut butter example from the previous section.
Someone who loves their partner and wants to care for their partner may experience a lot of distress from thinking they are so inconsiderate or forgetful they may hurt their partner.
People with OCPD or perfectionistic people, on the other hand, often have a self-image that aligns with the rigidity of their mental illness. They believe they have to achieve the best and misunderstand their mental illness as a mindset that doesn’t cause a negative impact.
Here, at Knockoff Therapy, we encourage people to use labels when they find them helpful and abandon them when they’re not. However, as a caveat to that conversation about labels, it’s important to recognize when avoiding labels causes more harm than good.
Let’s apply this concept to eating disorders (trigger warning: continue to the next section to skip this example). That way, we can understand the way that defining a problem as the problem that it is can be healthy.
It’s common for people to cut out certain foods as a part of diet culture. Unfortunately, it’s also often frowned upon to label this as disordered eating when it harms someone’s relationship with food as a source of fuel.
Therefore, people with OCPD may feel that their perfectionistic tendencies help them to achieve. However, that ignores the anxiety and distress that OCPD causes when working towards those achievements and how those symptoms originate from unhealthy perfectionism.
3. OCD is disruptive to daily functioning vs. OCPD is typically in alignment with self-image
The moment when a mental health condition becomes a diagnosable mental health disorder is usually when the mental illness impairs someone’s ability to function. Let’s begin by establishing that both OCD and OCPD can impair someone’s ability to function.
What differs is the perception of this impairment and how the distress of each mental health problem fits into the person’s self-awareness. OCD often requires compulsive actions that can be disruptive and distressing to daily functioning.
Maybe this means that someone with OCD can’t plan to get up and leave the house within an hour like everyone else. Instead, they have to plan time for putting on their deodorant forty times or, worse, they experience repetitive thoughts unexpectedly and leave the house late.
In contrast, as mentioned in the last section, OCPD typically aligns with self-image. So, someone with OCPD won’t notice the impairment they deal with. Instead, they view it as a natural extension of their personality or a personality trait that demands perfection.
To be clear, both anxiety disorders cause distress and can impair the person dealing with them. OCD may take up lots of time, whereas OCPD may cause someone to struggle with maintaining interpersonal relationships.
Someone with OCPD may have such rigid standards and a high drive to maintain control that they alienate the people in their lives. However, even in this case, people with OCPD may view the loss of interpersonal relationships (due to OCPD symptoms) as a minor loss.
People with OCPD may value their intense need for control more highly than the relationships they may lose.
The Next Step
We included a disclaimer on this blog, but we will repeat it again here. There is no replacement for professional diagnosis and everyone deserves to be diagnosed by a licensed clinician.
Whether you choose to pursue a mental health professional or not, please take care of yourself. Avoid boxing yourself into a diagnosis. If you relate to the content within this blog, it’s likely that someone could diagnose you with either OCD or OCPD.
That’s why it’s even more important to get another opinion from a trained professional before deciding on the best course of treatment for you.
We always want you to feel seen, even if you can’t afford to see a mental health professional. That’s why we’ve curated three different ways to understand the experiences of OCD sufferers and OCPD sufferers.
