Can OCD be a gift?

. . . I don’t really follow. I think that people with OCD can have great eyes for details, perfectionistic tendencies, and perseverance, but these seem to be more so personality traits common in people with OCD, and are not the OCD itself. They’re not a requirement for a diagnosis and some people with very real OCD lack these characteristics. OCD itself is a debilitating disorder of extreme doubt and fear and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s not a gift to be burdened with excessive emotional pain coming from your own mind. I also see no reason to think that OCD being treated would result in a loss of attention to detail or any of the skills you give in the example above. If the OCD is treated, you’ve learned to not be overwhelmed by intrusive fears and doubts; you didn’t get a whole new persona with different skills and you didn’t lose any personality components.

An interesting corollary: Can OCD be somehow “controlled” so that it can be exploited at will, but not damage relationships?

With untreated OCD, there is a hard, painful ceiling to his ambition. At some point, the compulsions he’s doing to be “perfect” will mean that it takes him so long to complete a basic task that he blows through deadlines, making him difficult to work with. He will get more and more high profile projects and he will break under the pressure because he puts so much pressure on himself already. People then see him as unreliable, and he is put on fewer high profile projects. His stress and anxiety leads to poor communication and he is a not seen as a leader, this also limiting how far he can go in his career. That all is to say that being a perfectionist got me straight As in high school and competitive scholarships in college. But then in the working world, OCD has blocked my ambition. I’ve found relative success in my career and I am an expert in my field, however, I’ve severed relationships because of missing deadlines and poor communication. For a long period of time, I could not send out job applications for fear of sending something that wasn’t perfect. I would have a mental breakdown every three to six months. It absolutely was not sustainable. Then a few months ago, I learned I have OCD and I am finally getting treatment. I now finally feel like I can achieve my wildest most ambitious dreams because I can recognize how debilitating the perfectionism is and i can manage the OCD symptoms. OCD is not a gift. The OCD diagnosis is a gift. The OCD treatment is a gift.