Justin Timberlake Has OCD?

There's a news story making the rounds today that Justin Timberlake "confessed" he has OCD and ADD during an interview posted June 16 on Collider.com. Why it took so long to make it to the mainstream media is anyone's guess, but the buzz seems to have began this morning when the Arizona Republic took the story and ran with it.

My questions: Was disclosing a true mental illness his real intent? Or was his comment a flip off-the-cuff and in-the-moment joke? We don't know for sure, since no statements have been forthcoming from the Tennman's camp. Fortunately, Collider published an audio recording of the actual interview. Here's what I heard.

Timberlake comes into the room for a group interview about the upcoming film, The Love Guru. He is apparently arranging the tape recorders on the table, possibly to make room for a cup of coffee, based on the snippets of conversation. Someone in the background asks jokingly, "Do you have the OCD where you have to fix everything?" To which Timberlake retorts, "No. Yes. I have OCD and ADD. I mean, you try living with that!" A lot of shifting around and giggling can be heard, then on to the interview. That's the entirety of Justin's so-called confession.

The story in the Republic is somber. "Justin Timberlake says he suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). The 27-year-old singer has revealed the condition affects many parts of his daily life - right down to making sure objects are always lined up perfectly. Justin, who also claims he has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), is quoted by website Collider.com as saying: "I have OCD mixed with ADD. You try living with that. It's complicated." Sounds adequately confessional, no?

Justin, if you have OCD, three cheers for you! Well done! Whenever a celebrity, especially a bright, talented and uber-achiever like Timberlake comes out of a closet, any closet, the positive shockwaves can ripple throughout society and have beneficial effects.

On the other hand, if it's a case of a few reporters and editors making hay out of a comment made in jest, shame on them for making fools of themselves and, in many minds, their profession. And let's not forget the celebrity who may have been unwittingly caught up in this.Sphere: Related Content
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Tim Russert & The Ineptitude of Death

Reading an AP story yesterday about reactions of ordinary fiftysomething men to the death of newsman Tim Russert reminded me of our denial of death. It was as if the wings of mortality had grazed the tops of their heads, as they so often do in these cases. The cruelty of the Grim Reaper's apparently arbitary choices for harvest is eased only a bit by platitudes like, "God picks his most beautiful flowers first."
Leo Tolstoy wrote a novella titled The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Bantam Classics) which informed my earliest thinking about death and continues to do so. In it, he deftly describes the sort of magical thinking in which we might wallow: "In addition to the speculation aroused in each man's mind about the transfers and likely job changes this death might occasion, the very fact of the death of a close acquaintance evoked in them all the usual feeling of relief that it was someone else, not they, who had died." Later he wrote, "'Ivan Ilyich has really bungled--not the sort of thing you and I would do.'"
Death as a symbol of weakness feeds our delusion of immortality. We certainly wouldn't be inept enough to die, would we?
Rest in peace, Mr. Russert.
ps. The beautiful "Lonely Tree" photo is courtesy of Tomasz Turczynski, an up and coming photographer in Poland.Sphere: Related Content
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Not Getting Enough OCD Meds?

According to a study released today, about 67% of patients newly diagnosed with OCD were insufficiently medicated, either in dosage or duration of therapy. You can read the story at medicalnewstoday.com . That certainly sounds dramatic, doesn't it? But considering the methodology of the research, it may not be quite so surprising. The data came from a retrospective claims analysis looking back nine years at 987 Medicaid recipients who were newly diagnosed with OCD. Could it be that the standard of care was deficient because of the insurance? Medicaid providers are notoriously underpaid and drugs are tightly managed. I'd place my bet that reimbursement rather than medical incompetence was the real issue.
I can't find anywhere in the study that pinpoints psychiatrists as the providers who either diagnosed or prescribed. In any event, I wanted to underscore how important it is that a psychiatrist, not your family physician, be responsible for psychiatric diagnoses and treatment. I just finished meeting with a client who was probably under-medicated for OCD by his family physician. Going to your family doctor for psychiatric treatment is akin to seeing an infectious disease doc to have your teeth cleaned.Sphere: Related Content
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A blogging experiment...
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Depressed, Just Not Sad

I'm not sure how much, if any, literature exists on depression sans sadness. I've seen it revealed so often in clinical practice, but how do we identify it, understand it? In common usage of the word "depressed," the speaker is often referring to the all-too-human condition of sadness. "I'm so depressed because I'm broke," we might hear one say.From a clinician's viewpoint, "depression" is diagnosed when there is a constellation of "symptoms" such as decreased appetite, insomnia or hypersomnia, lack of joie de vivre, and most significantly, a negative self-referral system ("I'm useless anymore," "Nobody cares about me," "I'm a terrible parent," etc).In fact, this self-deprecation is the hallmark of true depression. The relative battering one's self-esteem has endured is how we can separate the depressive from the sad. Feeling sad is part of how we're built; feeling depressed is the product of self-flagelltion run amok.That, then, is perhaps why there are so many cases in which an individual is depessed without feeling sad. At the end of a day flled with self-reprisals, the feelings would likely be numbed.Sphere: Related Content
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