Scrupulosity

Tonight I heard an authoress on Fresh Air who wrote a memoir about her adolescent bout with Scrupulosity. First of all, isn't that just the best disease name, ever? She said it was coined by the Catholic Church. Apparently, Martin Luther had it. What it is: a version of OCD where the compulsions are associated with religious practice, i.e the need to wash comes from the imagined presence of sin and the practice of the compulsions is a form of observance.

Some of you may recognize this real disease as strikingly similar to, and probably the basis of, one of the plot's of Orson Scott Card's Xenocide.

Listen to the Fresh Air interview here.