Dr Bread

Early prevention = HARM REDUCTION

You may not know you need to be on meds until you're evaluated.

It can take years and several second opinions to get a proper diagnosis & treatment plan.

If you wait until youre in crisis, you're far more likely to be misdiagnosed and/or given the wrong meds while in an already-fragile mental state.

Getting a diagnosis helps you understand yourself better, discover resources, and put saftey protocols and treatment plans in place in case you should ever need them.

Stigma should never outweigh harm reduction.

Waiting to seek professional help before you NEED it can lead to severe damage to yourself, your well-being, your cognitive function & relationships. It can progress your illness into harmful states that sometimes can not be reversed.

Getting help or a diagnosis isn't scary or shameful, its responsible and preventative.

———

Early prevention and diagnosis for mental health are critical because they stop mild symptoms from escalating into crises. Catching issues early improves long-term recovery rates, minimizes disruptions to work or school, and prevents secondary complications like substance abuse.

Prevents Escalation: Addressing symptoms early stops them from compounding into severe, chronic disorders that require intensive interventions.

Improves Quality of Life: Early treatment helps individuals maintain healthier personal relationships, academic success, and overall well-being.

Lowers Healthcare Costs: Timely interventions reduce the need for emergency room visits, psychiatric hospitalizations, and long-term disability.

Reduces Secondary Risks: Preventing conditions from worsening minimizes the likelihood of self-harm or suicidal ideation.

[National Institute of Health]

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination

I think that where a lot of "The Riddler has OCD" writing loses me is that they only go one layer into it. The Riddler is obsessed with riddles so he has to leave riddles to his crimes or else he loses it, and he's obsessed with riddles because he has childhood trauma from his dad not thinking he was smart enough as a kid or whatever. There's a couple different origins kicking around but I haven't read any Riddler comics that make it particularly compelling.

But that's the thing, isn't it? OCD in my experience doesn't have a particularly compelling origin story in someone's life, usually. It creeps up on you before you even know it's there. It's some kind of specific discomfort that you find a specific way to alleviate, and that pattern entrenches itself in your brain through repetition until all of a sudden you'll go insane if you don't do your Special Thing. But OCD feasts on pattern recognition and personal significance. So it's only in retrospect that you eventually sit back and think, ah, of course, this is when I developed my obsession and compulsion, this is how it affects me, clearly. It's only in retrospect that you solve the riddle.

And that's what I want to get at. The Riddler, to me, shouldn't be a character obsessed with riddles, he should be a character obsessed with answers. He should be a character so discomforted by the uncertainty of the world around him, of the falseness of meritocracy (and the very high place that he is so sure he should have in it), of the complete lack of control that he actually has, that he is compelled to force certainty, truth, and control in every place possible. Every scenario, every situation, every interaction is a puzzle with a clear and fair solution -- he just has to find it. In this sense, I don't think that the riddles he leaves for Batman or other heroes should be the compulsion in and of itself. I do think he does it to be arrogant, but I do think he also does it because that is how he sees everything he already does, whether it's a criminal caper or not -- as a riddle to be solved, and as a solution that should be rewarded. He's giving those pursuing him the same game that he's constantly playing himself but on what he believes is a much lower difficulty. To bring up the Joker comparison again, if the Joker is the, yknow, "chaos guy," chaos of any kind should make Eddie so nervous and sick that he wants to throw up and shit himself. He needs everything to be in order because he solved for this. He solved for this because the only way that he couldn't have solved for this would be if there's no actual perfect solution at all, and that just can't be true. It can't. (in this way, he's someone who probably thinks of himself as a logistics expert, a la Clock King, but he's actually far too unwilling to accept unpredictability for what it is to truly excel at that line of thinking.

[PT: What kinds of posts trigger moral & checking OCD (and psychosis)? /End PT]

So many people write and reblog posts that have very direct triggers towards folks with moral & checking OCD. Here are posts NOT to make/reblog.

To get the terminology out of the way - moral OCD is a condition in which a person becomes obsessed about doing something "morally wrong", and develops compulsive behaviors over it. Checking OCD is a condition in which a person becomes obsessed over checking over their own (or others) actions, as to avoid a perceived disaster, and develops compulsions around it.

Do NOT make/reblog posts with phrases such as:

"Reblog/donate/share or else you are letting me/someone I know die/suffer." "Reblog or else you're [insert bad thing]"/"Reblog if you're not [insert bad thing]"

^If it is an urgent donation post that you feel deserves to be shared, at the very least, add "tw reblog bait" and "tw OCD trigger."

"Reblog/like/comment/share or else [insert creature] will find you/stalk you/come into your house/etc" "[Insert thing] is coming to your location. You cannot stop it. It will be outside your window soon"/"[Insert thing] is in your walls."

^These ones can also trigger hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia in people with schizospec disorders/psychosis! It may seem like a "haha funny meme" to you, but to people with OCD or psychosis, they could fret heavily over this, and wonder if they are going to be in danger if they don't reblog/like/comment/share.

"It is illegal to be/have [insert thing here]." (Example: "It is illegal to be nonqueer during pride month", "it is illegal to have internalized ableism during disability pride month", etc.)

"If you think hateful thoughts about yourself, and you're queer, that's queerphobic, and it's illegal to be queerphobic during pride month!"

How about we not make straight queers* feel guilty and paranoid about being "not queer enough" during pride month? (*Aspec straights, trans & gender diverse straights, intersex straights, lesbihets, turihets, m-specs straights, polyamorous hets, nonrose hets, etc, etc, etc?)

How about we not make people with internalized queerphobia feel guilty for intrusive thoughts?

How about we stop making a billion posts encouraging moral OCD during pride month?

Ba sing se trio as kids🌱🔥🌻

I already designed jets parents way back and because I never read jins book (tbh I don’t like reading books period so I won’t ever) I also designed jins parents from scratch.

Azula and ozai isnt present cause I kinda wanna show how this is them in their happiest moments with the people they feel safe and love, which Ofc those two aren’t rlly with zuko.