On OCD

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

While this blog mainly chronicles my challenges with Bipolar Disorder, I will sometimes write on other co-morbid mental conditions I have. OCD is a mental illness that is heavily misunderstood. I can't tell you how many times I've heard statements like, "The Christmas ornaments aren't level, I'm so OCD" or "I need to have my roots done at the salon, I'm so OCD."

No, no you're not.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is very distressing to the sufferer. It combines obsessive, sometimes intrusive thoughts and in order to relieve the distress, the sufferer starts doing some type of ritual activity to relieve their distress. I will use myself as an example.

The earliest battle with mental illness that I had was with OCD. I remember being about age 8. Obviously, I didn't know I had OCD at 8 years of age. All I knew was that I had really scary thoughts that I didn't want to think about, and it caused me shame and anxiety. I thought that by performing certain tasks, I could make up for the bad thoughts.

So, for example, if my dad said, "I love you," I would say, "I love you, too." But then the scary thoughts popped into my head. What if I didn't really love my dad? That means that I just said a lie. God hates liars. Therefore, I have to confess to my dad that I sinned, or else I would go to hell. So then, I would whisper under my breath, "I might not really love you," and then I would whisper a prayer to God for forgiveness. My dad would looked at me weirdly, and ask, "What did you just say?" I would say, "nothing," and then the process would repeat.

Another example would be if my mom asked me if I did all of my homework. I would automatically say "yes" if I had done it, because I knew I had finished it. But the scary thoughts popped into my head. What if I had missed a question on the back page of my homework? That means I had just lied to my mom. So I would go double-check my homework, and confess to my mom that I had to "make sure." Now, my mom was not a particularly understanding mother (more on that later), and would get angry when I did these things, compounding my distress. I started picking at my skin.

Around this time, I was about 9, and I began having very scary, intrusive thoughts about killing myself, or about harming my mom or other people. This was traumatic to me, and when I told my mom of these things, she freaked out and told me I had a demon possessing me. Note that this is absolutely the wrong approach if your child reaches out to your for mental help. I was terrified, and my OCD worsened.

I began checking rooms compulsively for intruders. I was convinced there would be a burglar or something waiting for me at our house when I got home from school. I would spend 30 minutes checking closets, windows, door locks, etc. I would pick at my skin until I started bleeding, mostly on my face. I started checking for appliances being plugged in, lights left on that could catch fire, and so on.

My OCD would worsen at times, and sometimes it would get better. I didn't have it as much in junior high school because I was too invested in homework and trying not to feel like an outcast.

In high school, though, my OCD came back with a vengeance. I would get up three hours early for school to get through my rituals. I would shower and wash my hair in a certain way, and if it wasn't done correctly, I had to re-do it, otherwise, something bad might happen. I would then dress and spend thirty minutes checking and re-checking my backpack and homework assignments to make sure they were all there. I would then go to my car (at this point, I was 16). I would have to go inside three times to make sure I had turned off all the faucets in the bathroom, and turned off the lights in my bedroom. I would have to make sure my computer was off so it wouldn't catch fire. Then I would check under my bed and around my room to ensure nothing was left behind.

Once I got in my car, I would lock the front door (mother having already left for work earlier). I would then have to re-check it, sometimes driving home from school between classes to check. Once I made it in my car, I had to say a prayer a certain way three times, are something awful would happen.

Then I would spend the next sixty minutes driving a half-mile to school. Yes, you read that right: It would take me an hour to drive 0.5 miles to school (I had to drive, there were no sidewalks to walk on and the bus did not come to our neighborhood due to a weird restriction, and we have bad weather 5 months out of the year which made walking impossible). I would drive to school, and I would become convinced that I had run over an animal or a child, and I would have to go back and re-check to make sure that I had not hurt something by accident.

Once I made it to school, about an hour before it started, I would begin again compulsively checking my backpack to make sure I wasn't missing anything. I would make sure every pencil was sharpened just so. I would go the restroom and check and double-check that my appearance was OK. I would become convinced that I had sat in something that would leave a mark on my pants on my rear-end, and that I would be mocked for it. So I would spend the next thirty minutes checking and re-checking myself in the girls' bathroom to make sure my clothing was ok.

Once I made it to class, I would set everything out and begin re-checking my backpack for things I may have missed.

And so on.

I began restricting the types of shows I watched on TV. Anything violent was a no-go, because I could go crazy at any moment and hurt someone, somehow driven by the show. This lasted into my early twenties. I remember watching a TV police-themed show, and I turned it off because I was scared I would commit the crimes on the show.

Around this point in time, I had begun seeing a psychiatrist for anxiety and depression. The anti-depressants helped a lot, and I began to see my OCD symptoms go into remission. As I dealt with my next diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder, OCD took a backseat.

Currently, all of the psychiatric medications I take dulls the urge to perform the rituals. OCD is still there; I still pick at myself which drives my family crazy, and I still check things sometimes. But I know that there is a cause of the intrusive thoughts. I cried when I was diagnosed with OCD and read the symptoms. It was like someone looked inside my head and wrote about it. The intrusive thoughts weren't because I was crazy or evil, the urge to check things was explainable in a medical fashion.

I want other people to read about people suffering with misunderstood illnesses. If my mother had gotten me to a doctor, my life may have turned out differently. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference since I ended up with Bipolar Disorder. But OCD is such a weird, strange phenomenon. It caused me so much distress during my childhood, I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Treatment is possible for OCD. Anti-depressants and CBT are used. I have found Self-help books enormously helpful since I can't take anti-depressants due to Bipolar Disorder. The best book I have read is Freedom from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder by Dr. Jonathan Grayson. A lot of books just give you surveys and rating scales for whatever disorder you are reading about. This book, however, really shows an understanding of OCD. He calls OCD the "Doubting Disease," and says that OCD sufferers may even doubt their diagnosis. (I have no affiliation with the author or the book).

Here is site with some generic facts about OCD and symptoms.

Each disease is different for everybody. I don't compulsively wash my hands, but I know a lot of OCD sufferers do, and it really fucks up their hands. I do compulsively skin pick to this day, but not as severely as some of the cases I have read about.

OCD is so very weird and disturbing that I think people don't seek treatment for it. After all, who wants to walk into a psychiatrist's office and say, "Hullo. I have gruesome images of stabbing my family to death, and have had my spouse hide knives from me so I don't do it," or "Sorry I'm late, I thought I had run over three dogs on the way over and had to be sure I didn't. It's hard to tell disturbing thoughts to someone.

Here is the link to the International OCD Foundation.

I write these posts with personal details in the effort that someone reading them will realize they are not beyond help and that lots of other people deal with these types of disorders. I think that our government needs a department focused on mental health and be screening teenagers for these disorders so as to prevent unnecessary suffering.