Here's What It's Like To Have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Friday, June 20, 2014 SPORK! 0 Comments

Pens and markers especially — if a classmate borrowed them, I’d bring them home to wash, or douse them in hand sanitizer. Eventually, it became easier to simply throw them away.  

At my worst, I could literally lose days to obsessing over a dirty public restroom I’d seen.

My imagination would cook up weird and totally implausible scenarios; I’d imagine I had dipped my lip gloss in the toilet, and then I’d start feeling as if it had really happened (even though, on some level, I knew it hadn’t). 

When you’re having increasingly disgusting and bizarre thoughts at every turn (Peeing in the blender? Eating excrement and forgetting about it?) and going to greater lengths to get rid of them (endless washing), doing anything normal becomes virtually impossible.

Often, I would have an OCD thought at the front of my mind for upwards of two-thirds of my waking hours. I’d sleep in ridiculous 16-hour stretches just to escape.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, obsessive-compulsive disorder affects roughly one percent of adults in the United States. But because symptoms often begin in childhood, that actually underestimates OCD’s prevalence in a population at large. You almost certainly know someone who is a true sufferer. 

OCD’s name comes straightforwardly from the two components of the disorder, both of which are experienced by most patients: obsessions, which are repetitive, unwanted, and upsetting thoughts (usually about contamination, order/symmetry, or moral wrongs); and compulsions, which are the actions sufferers use to try to ease their anxiety about the obsessions (like hand washing, counting, and checking). 

This destructive obsession-compulsion cycle is a healthy human response gone haywire. It’s normal to feel apprehensive, averse, and even a little anxious with respect to things that are dirty, morally wrong, or somehow “off.”

We’ve evolved to be attuned to these characteristics for our health and safety. But in an OCD sufferer, this adaptive response becomes overblown in a way that doesn’t help the person to lead a better life, and actually starts to ruin it instead...

> Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a leading cause of disability worldwide, with causes not fully understood