Individuals with Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder are preoccupied with orderliness, perfectionism, and extreme control over mental and interpersonal behavior. They prefer perfectionism over efficiency.
Give more importance to rules, scheduling, procedures to such an extent that the point of the activity is lost. They spend more time planning than in execution.
Diagnostic criteria:
- Maintain a sense of control through giving much attention to rules, order, organizing.
- Pay more details to the work than needed and repeatedly checking for any possible mistakes.
- Poor time management- Spending more time in planning than execution.
- Perfectionism over completion: Giving attention to every trivial detail that they never finish any project on time.
- Exessive devotion to work that they do not spend any time in leisure or with friends & family.
- Inflexible behavior- Individuals with OCPD are rigid over rules, morals, ethics, or values.
- Discarding difficulty– Individuals with OCPD often find it difficult to discard items.
- Difficulty in working in groups: Due to their inflexibility regarding rules and rigid character, it makes it difficult to work in group projects.
- Stubbornness: Individuals with OCPD are stubborn over ways of doing things. They do not comply with others over different ways of doing things.
Risk Factors:
- Strict adherence to rules makes others difficult to work with them.
- Due to their excessive checking for mistakes and perfectionism, they repeatedly fail to meet deadlines of projects at school and work.
- They are “neither a borrower nor a lender“ and do not lend money even when their friends or family are in dire need of it.
- Have a low life with no possible hobbies, low-living standards than they can afford.
- They are autocratic leaders and are never flexible to group ideas.
Word from PsychHelp
Individuals with OCPD suffer from poor relationships as they have difficulty in emotional expressiveness. They usually hold back things they want to say until they are sure of what they say is perfect.
- They are preoccupied with logic and intelligence than emotion or feeling.
- Individuals with an anxiety disorder or Generalized anxiety disorder are at risk of having OCPD.
OCPD should always be differentiated from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Hoarding disorder.