My OCD left me fearing I’d hurt somebody – if I didn’t do things a certain way, people would come to harm
EVER said: “That’s my OCD” when stepping over cracks in the pavement or talking about how clean your kitchen is?
OCD has become such a common term we’ve all likely mentioned it at some point.
But the reality for people diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder can be completely debilitating.
“OCD is one of the most misunderstood conditions – even among medical professionals,” expert Dr Lynne Drummond tells Sun Health.
“It’s often treated as a minor thing, a bit of a joke or a quirk, but in clinical form it affects between one and three per cent of us.”
That includes celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and David Beckham, who have talked about their struggles with OCD symptoms.
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Like other mental health conditions, with OCD there is a sliding scale of symptoms and severity. For many, “It is devastating,” says Dr Lynne.
“OCD involves having really horrible thoughts — the very worst thoughts you possibly could have that cause you extreme distress.
“I’m talking about loving parents having thoughts that they’re going to be violent or sexually assault their child. It is abhorrent to them, and then they need to do an activity to get rid of the thought.”
With her new book, Everything You Need To Know About OCD, Dr Lynne hopes to get people talking more about it “in a realistic way, not a jokey way, and realising that it isn’t somebody’s fault they have OCD.
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“It’s not them being awkward or difficult, it’s a real mental health problem.”
- Everything You Need To Know About OCD, by Dr Lynne Drummond with Laura J. Edwards, is published by Cambridge University Press, priced £12.99, and is available now.
THE MOST COMMON TYPES
OCD symptoms are much broader than the light-switch flicking and rigorous handwashing you might be aware of, says Dr Lynne.
“The key to OCD are these really nasty, intrusive thoughts, images or impulses that come into the mind and cause you to have extreme anxiety, discomfort, and abhorrence.
“If you’re frightened of something, you normally run away from it, but you cannot run away from your own mind.”
People with OCD design an activity or thought to reduce or prevent the harm of the obsessive thought.
These obsessions and compulsions come in various categories:
Contamination fears
Decontamination and extensive washing compulsions. Fear of harm to self or others due to failure to act appropriately – they might turn light switches on and off a number of times to reassure themselves, or have a specific undoing thought or need to retrace their steps.
Perfectionism
They feel if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing completely and utterly correctly. “But perfection isn’t the human state. Most of us try to be good enough. If you try to be perfect, you become slowed and you end up not achieving it.”
Slowness and symmetry
The need to arrange things in a certain way. This is usually related to perfectionism.
Worry about the loss of objects or body parts
“I know someone who had a bath full of poo, because they were frightened they were going to lose something,” says Dr Lynne.
Ruminations
Horrible thoughts that you need to “cancel out” with other thoughts.
‘Taboo’ obsessive thoughts
Distressing images, thoughts, or impulses that are against everything they believe in, for example, blasphemous thoughts, violent thoughts or sexual thoughts. “Sexual thoughts can be misconstrued as being a desire for that, when actually in some ways the people having them are the safest, because the idea is so abhorrent to them.”
TREATMENT OPTIONS
WHEN it comes to treatment, there are two main approaches:
MEDICATION: Serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs)
People with OCD require a high dose. Specific anti-OCD effects take around three months to kick in and can accrue for up to two years.
PSYCHOLOGICAL TREATMENT: Exposure and response prevention (ERP)
ERP therapy involves facing up to situations that cause anxiety and remaining there without performing the compulsions and rituals until the anxiety comes down.
“You can’t jump in at the top – you need to do it in a gradual way,” says Dr Lynne.
CASE STUDY 1
“I WAS almost a recluse because of the fear of contamination. I had an intrusive compulsion to repeat things and count everything in fours.
“It impacted on everything I did. The suggested treatment sounded horrifying – things like touching a toilet seat then eating a cucumber sandwich immediately without washing my hands.
“I managed to marry, have children and get back into work, managing things as best I could, but still having endless intrusive thoughts. Twenty years later, Triumph Over Phobia (topuk.org) helped me to recover gradually, enough to sustain a normal existence.
“It is remarkable, and my life has changed so much. I still get intrusive thoughts, but the difference is I no longer react to them. However challenged you are by OCD, you deserve a life where you feel more comfortable.”
ANONYMOUS, developed OCD in her late teens
'I FEARED I'D HURT OTHERS'
NOTHING could have prepared Shaun Gordon for what happened to him when he was suddenly overwhelmed by OCD symptoms in his late teens.
The 39-year-old, from Brighton, says: “I felt completely trapped.
“I couldn’t get past the idea that if I didn’t do certain things a certain way, people would come to harm.
Shaun didn’t know what that harm might be, but was driven to try to prevent it.
“I felt the need to record information by writing it down. I’d try to go to the shop, but I couldn’t make it.
“Street names, shops, names of people, directions people were walking in – anything that came into my awareness – it was written all over my body so it looked like I’d been tattooed.
“I’d touch car number plates and count in multiples of ten.”
Shaun’s mum would have to coax him home. He would also have intrusive thoughts, wrongly believing he had hurt strangers.
“I became afraid of going to places and asking people questions,” he says.
“I wouldn’t just do it once, I’d do it over and over, and they wouldn’t understand what was going on.”
His life became “unstable” to the point he was calling one friend repeatedly.
“I thought I’d be able to rest if I got him to say he was OK in the right way, the right number of times. But it wasn’t like that. The more I did it, the worse it became,” Shaun recalls. “I was overwhelming people. It was just inescapable. I could not stop.”
Because Shaun’s OCD came on so rapidly, early intervention was possible.
But recovery is an ongoing process.
“Coronavirus was hard,” he says. “For so many years I thought if I touched a person, I’d pass germs to them. Then coronavirus came along and it was like, ‘Okay, so now it’s true’.”
Symptoms evolve over time too. “It’s almost like OCD tries to survive. It’s not unusual to find other symptoms come out of nowhere, like it’s got a life of its own.”
Today, Shaun says that thanks to therapies and medication he can “live my life, pretty much how I want to, based on my own resilience and experience.”
“I’m certainly not cured,” he adds, “but life’s all right – recovery is fluid.”
'I WALKED 200 MILES TO CLINIC'
DOMINIC BLYTH, 62, from East Yorks but now living in Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic developed OCD in the late 1980s. He says:
“MY life became disabled By behaviours ensuring I had done everything so precisely and perfectly that the world around me and those in it were safe. The theory is I developed OCD because of the trauma of losing my brother in a car crash.
“I was struggling but surviving. Then my best friend was murdered in the Rwandan genocide.
“My OCD took a nosedive. I went to pieces. After waiting three years for a mental health services appointment, I gave up.
“I packed a rucksack and set off, teaming up with another homeless chap.
“Mike was an ex-RAF tornado pilot who’d been thrown on the scrapheap like me.
“He found an article about a specialist OCD clinic in Welwyn Garden City, run by Professor Naomi Fineberg.
“I walked 200 miles there and she treated me until I could be referred to the OCD service at Springfield Hospital, South London.
“That gave me my strength back. They gave me the ammunition to be my own therapist. I left there and I’ve never looked back.”
HOW TO HELP
“IF you live with someone with OCD, the crucial thing to know is people cannot snap out of OCD,” says Dr Lynne. “It’s not something you can just decide not to do.”
So how do you enable them to get help?
“One of the problems is that families tend to get disrupted and involved in the compulsions,” says Dr Lynne.
“It’s understandable – you don’t want to see your loved one distressed.”
However, the more involved you are, the more you perpetuate the rituals, and the less likely your loved one is to seek help.
“Make sure you’re not accommodating the OCD too much, so it gently encourages the person with OCD to seek help,” recommends Dr Lynne.
“Be supportive and be helpful. Try not to get over-involved in the rituals or, for that matter, the reassurance.
“Some people ask for reassurance all the time – ‘Is this ok? Is this ok? – and once is never enough. They might ask you 500 times.”
Not engaging with rituals can sometimes lead to outbursts of aggression and violence.
“If that happens, call the authorities because if damage were to happen, that would not be in the person with OCD’s interest or the person who might be injured.”
However, ultimately the only person who can decide to go for treatment is the individual with OCD.
WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE
SO what are the major misconceptions with OCD? “We need more research and more awareness,” says Dr Lynne. “You can get better, OCD does respond well to treatments, but people tend to suffer in silence and don’t get the treatment they need.”
More widely, we need to smash the stigma around mental health conditions, and take OCD seriously.
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“The way people say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got a bit of OCD,’ doesn’t really help the situation and trivialises it a little bit,” says Dr Lynne.
“We all have nasty thoughts sometimes, but in people with OCD, those thoughts keep coming back, over and over and over again.”