Today is ‘World Mental Health Day’, and I thought it would be a good day to publish this post. But I’m posting specifically about OCD, as this week is OCD awareness week. After all, partly because of the issues I have with ‘mental health awareness days’ (although of course overall, they are a good thing), I can much more relate to the latter. But this is mostly because OCD is probably the mental health condition I’ve been most affected by, and it is the one that has an incredible amount of misunderstanding and stigma.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll have seen me
post a lot about OCD, but amongst the Instagram rants, resources, and reposts,
I realised I’ve never actually published a blog post about it: what it is, and
its presence in my life. Therefore, in honour of this week, I have decided to
do just that. I’m Evie, I’m many things, a multi-faceted human, and I have OCD.
***
Someone on the radio is asked how to describe themselves and
one of the words they use is ‘OCD’. Trying to reserve judgement, that she may
in fact have the debilitating disorder, she then says how much she likes a
clean environment.
Khloe Kardashian pens the phrase ‘Khl-OCD’ in a series about
how organised she is.
A boy with OCD appears on Good Morning Britain for starting
a car-cleaning business, and says his OCD is not a disease, it’s an
advantage.
Scrolling through Facebook, I see a video about people doing
‘triggering’ things like cutting a cake wrong, and underneath, a comment reads ‘Should
send this to anyone with OCD that has time in their life to make
everything look perfect.’ Yeah, us OCD sufferers, we just have loads of time on
our hands.
After Arlene Phillips said before going in the jungle that
she was OCD, and there was a negative response to this, people responded by
saying the woke brigade think that OCD, a thing about being clean, is suddenly
a mental illness. Well, they have a point. A like of things being clean is not
a mental illness. But that’s not OCD.
If you type OCD into Etsy, the following comes up: ‘I have
OCD. Obsessive cheese disorder.’ ‘I have CDO. Like OCD, but the letters have to
be alphabetical.’
‘I’m a bit OCD about that.’
‘Aren’t we all a bit OCD?’
The other week, I was packing up my room to move out of my
family home and I found diaries I had from when I was about 13. I have a weird
relationship with these diaries: they present the distressing reality of the
place I was in when I was that age. I hated myself, I thought I was evil, and
the pages are filled with asterisks everywhere to use up every centimetre of
space. I would rake through any tiny thought I had, but also the bigger ones,
ones I thought meant I was a terrible person.
This was a 13-year-old girl living with OCD, but I didn’t
know it yet. It morphed and changed into many things - and still does. And one
of the reasons why it took me another 8 years to get a diagnosis, was partly
because of things like the above. I grew up in a world where to have OCD, or
more likely, to ‘be OCD’, was to line up your pencils and clean your room.
So, I went on, obsessing over my past, my morals, not being
able to read well because I had to solve every thought I had and fully
understand everything I was reading. Then I was obsessing over my reality, and
how I was feeling. I couldn’t decide what was ‘real’, I felt ‘off’ but couldn’t
explain why, I just kept analysing. When it moved to my relationships, when I
was depressed and confused about how I felt, when I would seek out reassurance
from anyone about how I should feel, that’s when it happened. One afternoon, my
friend called me and said, ‘We’ve been learning about a form of OCD called
‘Pure O’ (more on this later) which can include ‘Relationship OCD’ and I think
you have it’. After some frantic research, I got my answers. Intrusive
thoughts, doubts, reassurance seeking, depression… it was a real lightbulb
moment.
At the time, I thought I was just experiencing this
‘subset’, but I realised how big a role OCD played and had been playing in my
life since I was young.
Since then, I’ve experienced obsessions about germs and
insects, illnesses and death, organisation and perfectionism. I’ve thought that
an envelope I got delivered at work is actually Novachok. I’ve been to the
doctors too much.
When you have OCD, it can manifest in anything, and people
with OCD will experience different forms of it. Of course, I can only write about
the ways it has manifested for me, but it will look different for everyone and
I’m no expert in anyone else’s OCD.
This blog post may be long and detailed, with the urgent
need to explain everything ‘just right’. I will do my best to not make it a
compulsion in this way. I will strive, afterwards, to not convince myself I’m
attention-seeking and selfish. I will try not to deep-dive into analysing my
experience of OCD, how I’m feeling right now, and disassociate myself. But this
is how my brain works, and this is my OCD.
What is OCD?
You have an obsession, an intrusive thought,
feeling, sensation, urge, that you can’t stop thinking about. This can be a
very wide range of things: ‘If I don’t touch that table again, my Mum will
die’, ‘The thought that I could hit that person with my car just crossed my
mind, that means I want to murder people’ ‘Do I really love my partner?’
Now, everyone has intrusive thoughts, we’ve all stood on the edge of a platform and thought ‘I could just jump in front of this train right now’. For people with OCD, those thoughts are more frequent, and intense, and they then question, dissect, and believe the thought to be true, and will do anything to get certainty about what it means.
They must perform a compulsion to get momentary relief for example, touching the table, googling ‘Am I a murderer?’, sitting and thinking, mentally checking and reviewing, washing their hands, asking others for reassurance, etc. They are in a desperate need for certainty.
'Pure O' is a term to describe those who mainly have ruminative compulsions - so they are still performing compulsions (so I think the term has its issues), but they are not visible.
OCD is not an adjective; it is a disorder. It
has been ranked by the World Health Organisation as one of the top-ten most
debilitating illnesses. It is not liking things neat, tidy and lined-up. If you
like what you’re doing, it’s not OCD. It has been an incredibly painful companion in my life.
I don’t know whether this belief stems from Contamination OCD, one of the many, many, many manifestations of the disorder, or the repetitive behaviours and rituals. I don’t blame the individuals. They are simply perpetuating something so ingrained and believed in society. But imagine if we still looked at other anxiety disorders in that way, or depression? Completely misjudged and misidentified it? Used it to describe a quirk, or weird personality trait, or butt of a joke?
It is intensely frustrating and upsetting to people who
struggle, who are wiped out in bed, who get into tears daily or weekly with
overwhelm. The simple truth is this is incredibly dangerous. The more this myth
is spread and believed, the less awareness there is about what OCD is, the more
people will not know they have it, will not know what is wrong with them, will
go on suffering, will die.
My OCD has obviously changed over time. I’ve been having therapy for over 2 years, and I’ve learnt so much about my brain, and life, and what it means to be human. The way I view OCD has developed, and I know it’s not so black and white a lot of the time, like everything in life. Brains are complicated and messy.
I am better able to recognise it now, and better able to not
perform compulsions. I remember in the past, feeling myself go hot and achy
with the speed of the thoughts rushing around my head, coming too soon to keep
up with solving each element of every one, but you have to do it, you have to
solve every thought, and you have to try desperately to remember everything you
thought.
But I do still struggle. A lot. All the things I’ve talked
about in the post still play their role in my life. And sometimes it’s
incredibly sneaky. I’m also more susceptible to give in to my compulsions when
I’m tired or stressed. I also deal with low moods, which could have roots in my
OCD (although this is like chicken and egg, and you can never know what’s
what). OCD can create comorbidities. This basically is the presence
of more than one health condition. It is common for people with OCD to
experience depression.
So, what now?
Well, we go on, advocating and trying to raise awareness to
break the stigma and misinformation about this illness. And I go on getting
therapy. I don’t know if you ever ‘get over’ OCD, but I think you find ways to
cope with your symptoms. And maybe, if you read this and recognise it in
yourself or others, you can reach out or start conversations.
I’m going to leave some links below where you can get more
information, including a link to a resource I made on OCD here. But for now, I hope you learn something about OCD this awareness
week, and I wish you all a peaceful October.
https://www.madeofmillions.com/conditions/obsessive-compulsive-disorder
https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd/about-ocd/
https://ocdaction.org.uk/
https://www.ocduk.org/
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