Customer Reviews

Why Does Everything Have to Be Perfect? Understanding Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (The Dell Guides for Mental Health)

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I've just been officially 'diagnosed' with OCD, and found this book to be very helpful to someone 'new' to finding info about OCD. This is the first OCD book I've read, and plan on reading others in the same category soon. The book's structure is a question/answer format. Chapters discuss symptoms, related disorders, diagnosis, causes, medications, various therapies, and other ways to help yourself and how others can help you. It's very easy to read and very detailed... no long case stories (just a few short examples), but rather straightforward information about OCD. Some of the information is repetitive towards the end, but that's not necessarily a bad thing because it fits well into the content.

This book is very easy to read, set up in a question/answer format (which may also become a bit tiresome 100 pages in, but overall, it works). However, the book is intended for someone who probably has very little, if any, exposure to OCD ever. There is little new insight to how deep & all-consuming this disorder can be. And although I am thankful not to have have been ambushed by case studies, there isn't one to back up ANY of the given information. Additionally, there is a great deal of talk about the use of anti-depressants to potentially kill two birds with one stone (helping the depression that often goes hand-in-hand with OCD), it completely glosses over any other disorders (which can be many) that may accompany OCD and whose prescriptions would wholly CONFLICT with anti-depressants.

If you're curious about some of the insights to OCD or if you're wondering how to handle a few of your own mild OCD symptoms, this book provides a series of questions followed by answers, but it doesn't particularly get to the heart of things. It doesn't explain too much of why & it really doesn't explain too much of what to do about it (other than to go down either the medication (anti-depressant) or the meditation routes).

However, if you have a "lighter" (if there is such thing) version of OCD that doesn't consume your or your family's day-to-day lives, but just need tending before it gets out of hand, this book might be the book for you. It's not too scientific, not consumed by case studies, not too long, but not too helpful if you're REALLY gripped by OCD.