What is Chuck's real illness?

Will try to avoid major spoilers, but spoiler-tagged just to be safe.

It's been apparent--and S3 all but confirmed--that Chuck's claimed sensitivity to electronics is not an actual condition. However, the scenes of him in the copy shop in "Nailed" among others make it clear that he is indeed suffering from serious pain of some kind.

I am not a psychiatrist. But all the evidence seems to suggest to me that Chuck really has a form of OCD. Most people think of OCD only in terms of Jack Nicholson's character in As Good As It Gets and that they are just extreme germophobes. The truth is, though, that OCD manifests itself differently depending on the sufferer, and the one thing Chuck obsesses over more than anything is control. Think of the need Chuck has for control--keeping the Mesa Verde documents at his house (allowing Jimmy to mess with them) instead of at HHM where they belonged. Trying to browbeat Howard and the other partners into keeping him in at the firm.

Several people have pointed out that, in "Chicanery," the battery planted in his suit jacket doesn't conduct electricity in and of itself and was thus a plot hole. But think about it: Chuck completely set himself for this. If his EHS was real, he would have been fine with simply asking everyone to turn their phones off so they wouldn't send any electromagnetic signals. But no, that isn't good enough--he insists on them being out of the room completely. The fact that he gets everyone to agree to such extreme lengths to accommodate him really illustrates his irrational need to control everything and everyone around him.

Similarly, after getting Jimmy off the hook for the Chicago Sunroof incident, Chuck tried to control Jimmy by forcing him to move out West and work in his firm. But Jimmy subverts Chuck's control by getting his own law degree and passing the bar, because Jimmy refuses to let others define who he is. Its almost certainly not a coincidence that Chuck's "EHS" began flaring up around this time, one Jimmy was out of his control.

That's just my uneducated theory on Chuck. Any others?

Submitted July 28, 2017 at 04:42PM by Schmedlapp http://ift.tt/2vRIAL1