I’m so OCD lol

Abstract Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by recurrent thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors (compulsions) that are thought to help mitigate obsessions ( APA, 2013 ). 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 et al., 2004 ) 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.