What Is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

1. What Is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? Should You Check It Out A Bit More? Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder which can be incredibly disabling for the sufferer, and cause lots of anxiety and heartache for the loved ones around them. It is a very misunderstood problem, and in every day tasks, people will often tell their friends “Oh, I’m being a bit OCD today, I keep checking my door”, or “I’m being very OCD as I can’t get that song out of my head”. The reality of OCD for someone who has it is a very different picture. The disorder involves focussing on a particular worry or set of worries, the “Obsession” to the exclusion of everything else in their life. The “Compulsion” bit of OCD is a particular behaviour which a person carries out in order to try and calm down the worry and doubt, that is happening for them. For example, Jane worried that a fire may break out in her house, and that if she was not careful, she may leave a switch on, or a device which may ignite when she was out. This caused her to have a very detailed routine of checking all of the sockets, the tv remotes, the PC, the light switches, the cooker and oven, the hairdryer and curling tongs and many more things, each day, before leaving for work. But because she needed to be sure it was all safe, and she could not always remember accurately because she was anxious, she had to check it all 3 times in a special order. This meant that she had to allocate an hour to checking before going to work every day, in order to get out of the door. This made her late for work every day, which made her anxiety worse. There are different types of OCD. Jane has a classic type of OCD, but there are also ones called “Pure O”, where the obsession and compulsion appears to be completely in the mind. These are usually around beliefs about being a “bad” person – believing that you may want to hurt your family, due to intrusive thoughts about stabbing someone. So, every time you see a knife in the kitchen it triggers a terrifying thought. Or people who worry that they are sexually deviant, or they have a belief that if they think about the devil then they will go to Hell. When they cannot control these “awful” thoughts, they condemn themselves for thinking about them and feel even more focussed and terrified of them. After all, if someone tells you: “Do not think about a pink elephant in a blue field”, What do you think about?

2. OCD can be a very severe anxiety disorder, which is maintained by a person’s over- inflated sense of responsibility (eg “I have to keep my family safe by making sure I don’t poison them with my cooking, therefore I have to check everything I use, cook and clean 10 times to keep them safe, including washing my hands multiple times). Research has shown that people with OCD find it much harder to override concerns about threat than others, so it gets exacerbated more than usual. If your brain is sending you a warning signal and going on “alert” mode constantly, this gets very hard to ignore. We also know that people with OCD find uncertainty really hard to cope with – if your hands are not scrupulously clean when you are cooking, how do you know that you won’t infect your child with something which can cause illness later on in their life? The good news is that there is good treatment out there to help overcome OCD. For many sufferers, they find it hard to ask for help because they believe that their thoughts are so terrible, they never talk to anyone about their concerns. This unfortunately means that people can go for years without the proper help to control and overcome their fears. Cognitive behavioural therapy for OCD is an evidence- based treatment which works. I have worked with many people who have suffered from both types of OCD and it is wonderful to see them reclaiming their lives again. Therapy is available from NHS IAPT services and private therapists, so don’t suffer in silence. There is good help out there, you just need to be brave enough to reach out and ask. I have put a link below to a Youtube video in which Katie D’Ath gives a useful introduction for people who want to know more about overcoming OCD. Katie D’Ath is an experienced Clinical Psychologist who is also an expert in OCD.