From my childhood diary. My thirteen-year-old self didn’t know this was OCD. Do they teach mental health in schools now? They didn’t back then, not much anyway.
I wish there was more I could offer to young kids today who think they might have OCD. All I can really offer is, if your brain starts to Play Games like mine did, go see a doctor or a therapist. But I know that’s not possible for everyone. My askbox is always open.
My OCD affects my eating a lot. (It’s a lot better than it used to be. There was one horrible time when I barely ate at all.) The most difficult part of my new therapy, by far, has been teaching myself to eat whatever I want instead of letting my brain just go ahead and say to me “If you eat X food, Y will die, even though that makes no sense whatsoever.” OCD is like that (i.e. horrible)
Anyway today there was a food market in Leicester and everything smelled DELICIOUS. It really sucks to be around food you know you can’t eat, but I wanted to try and break this OCD cycle (I’d just come out a therapy session) and have a shot at actually eating something when I wanted to eat something. So, encouraged by my boyfriend, I went to get a chocolate chip cookie. But it turned out that between us, we didn’t actually have enough change for one. Which was fine, in a sense, because we could’ve just gone to the cash machine and gotten more (after a long, long period of having no money, we’re now back on our feet, which is really great) but honestly I’d have probably lost my nerve by then.
It takes a LOT of nerve to break an OCD thing, honestly. It sucks. But – you were behind us in the queue and you gave me a pound. Which might well have been a tiny thing to you, but – I bought the cookie, and I ate it, and I was incredibly nervous for ages, but no-one died. Wow, it sounds completely ridiculous when you put it like that, but OCD is completely ridiculous I guess.
So thank you for giving me that pound coin. It really meant one hell of a lot to me.
- you never know if an intrusive thought will pass for just a minute or it will have a 4-month stay in your head.
- you know your fears are irrational but yet you don’t because they just feel too real.
- feeling guilty when you get a disgusting thought even though you know it’s out of your control but you feel like you’ll be an awful person if you don’t feel guilt over letting something so awful in your head.
- being scared of being scared.
- feeling like you won’t be able to go on with your life normally after a certain thought.
- wanting to speak to someone but yet feeling too ashamed to speak up or you know that the fear is too idiotic.
- when people think that OCD is just being tidy and washing your hands often.
- feeling scared when you don’t feel scared over something you’re usually supposed to be horrified by.
- every episode usually has one main thought that bothers you but other thoughts might occur too.
- being told that you’re too smart to have such irrational fears. like, i know but i can’t help it.
- it can be triggered by something most people would just pass by.
- feeling like you’re sharing a body with something/someone that’s not you.
- wishing you could just delete those thoughts from your head.
As someone with OCD I honestly think OCD is up there with some of the most misunderstood mental illnesses by the general public because so many times I’ve seen that even when people get that it’s not just like “oh I organized all my Buffy DVDs today, I’m so OCD”, they honestly, well-meaningly, genuinely think that it’s just that kind of thing but taken to the level of a disorder? That it is just an obsession with making things tidy or free of germs to the point of it interfering with their everyday life.
But that’s simply not true; OCD is an extremely complex mental illness which manifests in myriads of different ways for different individuals, with primary symptoms being severe, repeated intrusive thoughts which are extremely emotionally distressing to the individual (called “obsessions”, although it’s not an on-purpose obsession— the individual doesn’t want to be having these thoughts, but they won’t leave) and a specific kind of impulse control disorder.
People with OCD develop really specific “rituals”, often related to their intrusive thoughts (for example, Repeated mental image of loved ones dying → Feels compulsed to text their loved ones literally every five minutes and ask if they are okay, the whole day). Since these “rituals” are almost always self-destructive (for example, many people with OCD develop a ritual of self-injury) or destructive to relationships or jobs or hobbies or other aspects of a person’s life, these actually do nothing to quell the anxiety, and in fact make it worse, but the person with untreated OCD feels literally unable to stop. Additionally, almost all people with OCD experience some degree of magical thinking and for many people (including myself) OCD includes various degrees of psychotic symptoms. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; OCD can manifest in everything from motor control to executive functioning.
It’s a severely complex illness and it’s sad that it goes so often misunderstood and underdiagnosed. I think OCD awareness is really important!
Will Forte on How OCD Helped Him Get to ‘Nebraska’ | Child Mind Institute
*gives Will Forte an OCD solidarity fistbump*
[This is an attempt at a lighthearted (but informative) take on something that is absolutely horrible and destroys thousands of lives. Not lighthearted at all are the subjects you’ll find mentioned here: rape, sexual assault, suicide and child murder. So please, be safe.]
Welcome to the fun world of Fucked-Up Intrusive Thoughts! I’ll start.
When I was very young (nine? ten?) I heard a news story about ‘devil worshippers’ on the radio. My family were very religious at the time, but SURPRISE! I had severe OCD, although no-one knew it back then. By the end of the day I had convinced myself I was a devil worshipper, for no other reason than because things like ‘all that jumping around on the furniture you, a child of ten, are doing right now? That’s actually what devil worship is’ kept popping into my head. I lay awake that night fairly convinced I was going to hell, because OF COURSE I had accidentally worshipped the devil, and God was unlikely to care about whether I’d actually meant to or not. Eternity in hell for the ten-year-old!
Anyway, it got much much worse from there. Because intrusive thoughts are horrible, horrible things and while they can easily convince a little girl that she’s a devil worshipper they can also easily convince a grown adult that she just verbally abused someone in public, or needs to throw herself out of a moving car, or just sexually abused their newborn baby, or anything in fact. Fun times.
You would be amazed at how many people don’t understand intrusive thoughts. Even people in social justice circles. Like, it tends to go like this:
PERSON 1: I have disturbing, inappropriate sexual thoughts. Please help me get rid of them somehow.
PERSON 2: Clearly you are a Problematic™ potential predator/rapist. Away with you.
And so on. (This is actually not much of an exaggeration, by the way). But intrusive thoughts, be they of killing your child, committing sexual assault, pushing someone onto the railway tracks or anything – there’s one thing they all have in common –
You’re not going to do them.
No, you’re really not. I know this so firmly I’ve put it in both bold and italic. But don’t just take my word for it, everyone agrees and everyone knows that you’re not going to do them. Wikipedia agrees! OCD UK agrees! Clinical psychologists agree! The Huffington Post agrees!
Unfortunately, OCD and intrusive thoughts are designed to make you, brave soldier, completely disagree with this statement. But no matter what’s going on inside your head I swear that nothing horrible is happening outside of it. (Many has been the time I’ve had to look around and come to the conclusion ‘No-one is yelling at me or trying to hit me, so I must not have launched a torrent of slurs and insults onto a stranger in the street after all.’)
LASTLY, A VERY IMPORTANT THING: Apparently everyone actually gets intrusive thoughts – violent ones, sexual ones, disgusting ones – from time to time, but their brains healthily tune all that crap out. I cannot imagine what this may be like, and am somewhat jealous.
I keep having thoughts of hurting people I know/friends/family. Am I an abuser? – Nope. You have an anxiety disorder that keeps replaying scenarios that you’re afraid of. A thought alone doesn’t make you an abuser, the motivation behind those thoughts does. Your motivation is ‘oh god no these thoughts and these actions are horrible’. The absolute opposite of a abuser.
I keep having thoughts of harming my baby, am I a bad parent? – Nope. You have an anxiety disorder. (This point cannot be repeated enough). Also, if you’re a new mother scared of harming your newborn, you are very much not alone. Also also, no, none of the hundreds of mothers surveyed at that link actually harmed their children. Because that’s not what intrusive thoughts do.
I have sexual images of children pop into my head all the time. Am I a paedophile? – Nope, because you’re not sexually attracted to children. And in fact you’re terrified of the mere thought of it. What you’re getting is gross pop-ups from the internet server that is your mind, that’s all. Because you have an anxiety disorder (there it is again) that prevents you from crossing them out like all these mysterious normal people do.
Are you sure I’m not going to do the things my intrusive thoughts say I will? – I am very, very sure.
The Guardian’s had a couple of good articles about mental illness in Britain recently
