[rab] My last posting was just to explain why (perhaps??) I seemed rather boisterous at times, (I wasn't saying that you were or weren't) which is another way of "coping", but not my usual one, I think because of the complete novelty of it all, especially the Tim-Tams. And I was stone cold sober, so that wasn't any excuse either. You certainly didn't scare me, and am looking forward to hopefully visiting again next summer.

Which, in a way, brings us back to collecting junk: I have a small amount of "stuff", but mostly I have books (I've been very restrained, honest!!). I used to have a tendency to collect empty or hardly-used notebooks (mmmm stationery), but recently disposed of almost all of them. A lot of things will be farmed out to friends/relatives, and some stored, but I'm quite looking forward to starting again in January with little more than a suitcaseful. Should be interesting.

Wow, what a stream of revelations we have here. Bob is right to say that OCD is something quite different from "obsessiveness", and I get very angry when people talk about being "a bit obsessive-compulsive" and so on, when Goddammit! They haven't the faintest idea what it means. Sometimes I wish I could just turn my whole brain off and put it away in storage for a long, long, time. Someone asked earlier if OCD is related to autistic disorders, and there is evidence that it is. There is a greater overlap of occurrences of OCD and Asperger's than you would statistically expect, and indeed I have had my own brain photographed, rather excitingly, in an experiment to test this. Asperger's is the syndrome suffered by the narrator in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and one of the reasons I was so moved by that book was that, God help me, I identified with practically every aspect of him, except for being unable to read expressions, which is a defining characteristic of Aspergers. Many of the things that character does, such as counting, refusing to touch certain things, etc. are traits associated with OCD. Personally I think OCD, autism, and Asperger's are all somehow related, but people like me are very much on the "high-functioning" end of that spectrum, which means we can pass ourselves off as normal human beings. Well, most of the time.
By the way, it's true that some of these disorders are "over-diagnosed", but they are "under-diagnosed" as well. One in twenty adults in the UK has ADD, but the vast majority are never diagnosed.

rab] are you saying that you don't believe Projoy is a good thing ?
I can talk to anyone, but I hate listenintg. Ha ha.

Apologies, by the way, in case any of this is inappropriately confessional or too dull for anyone else! I've been thinking about it a lot recently (I do anyway, naturally) because someone at work actually guessed that I have OCD from watching my peculiar rituals, which rather shook me because, although I do peculiar rituals literally all the time, I normally hide them pretty well and people don't realise. Perhaps I'm getting worse.

I'm not sure whether things are over or under diagnoised. Does having a label help matters? I know that I've got many traits which are typical of many diseases (my thinking pattern is very common in people with schizophreina, I have depressive phases, I'm mildly dyslexic) and I'm sure if I was analysed fully I'd have all sorts of nasty disorders. But thankfully they don't affect my life much, and I consider myself to be fairly sane. So does diagnosing mild ADD, mild OCD or mild Aspbergers help? There's no definate treatment (although congitive therapy can help, but cognitive therapy can help a lot of people) so why the need to label it?