new thread
Since there has been quite alot of discussion lately about mental disorders and the like i thought it would be relevant to talk about OCD. I looked in the archives but there is very little little info to be found on this issue. I know that "Sorted", who used to be a frequent poster, used to suffer from it. I myself suffer from it.
What is OCD?
It is basically when the mind keeps getting unwanted thoughts and the OCD sufferer is unable to dismiss these thoughts. These thoughts are the obsessions and the compulsions are the mental and physical rituals the suffer does to satisfy these obsessive thoughts. It isn't as easy for an OCD sufferer to just stop these irrational thoughts and obsessions as a normal person would. If the sufferer doesn't fulfill these compulsions the obsessive thoughts can intensify and get worse until the sufferer gives in. It can be a very nightmarish, perpetual cycle of obsession-compulsion-obsession for some sufferers.
I have never been formally diagnosed with OCD but i have done extensive research on the internet and have been 'self-diagnosed', if you like. My OCD isn't too bad(compared to other sufferes i have seen) and i hope i will outgrow it one day. There are medications such as Prozac and counselling and other services available for suffers. Maybe i should enquire into these things.
Some examples of my obsessions include repeating a certain action such as closing a door exactly 3 times, or counting to 10 and other silly, irrational things. looking at my hair in the mirror excessively is also another one, since i love my hair. The number of different things i have to execute in order to fufil these obsessions over the years is countless.
I never feel comfortable talking about my disorder with strangers, infact my parents don't even know i have it. For some reason i never feel comfortable about talking about 'touchy' subjects like those things with them. A close friend, yes, but not my parents, dont know why?
I'm not sure if there is a link between OCD and longhair but i have wanted long hair for many years, even before i started growing it. I used to wear my sisters wigs and fantasize about having mighty long hair, real hair.
Anyways, this post is becoming an essay, so i think i will stop. If there are any other sufferers here i would be happy to talk via private email. Thanks.
Hey 80's_Metal, I can relate to this. I don't feel right unless I do a 25 mile hard fast bike ride nearly every day. The problem is it rains a lot at this time of year. I DON'T ride in the rain, and I DON'T miss my rides. This means driving to a rain free location as far as 150 miles from home with my bike in the back of my car, in order to get my daily exercise. Would this be considered OCD?
Absalom
I have suffered from OCD and Depression all of my life.
For the past few years I have received therapy for my condition and have been feeling so much better. My long hair seems to give me an overall inner peaceful feeling for when I look at pics of myself with short hair I see a guy who was really unhappy with life, this in part with his condition but also with many other deep, suppressed feelings that I'm still overcoming but dealing much more effectively with...
Hi David,
It is good to see i'm not the only OCD 'freak' around here.
Thankyfully i don't have depression like you do. I can be pessimistic at times and very grim but this is part of my personality, not depression though. I'm exactly the same, when i look on old photos of myself i cringe at the length of my hair. It just isn't me. I think long hair might help a bit with my OCD since i am acomplishing a life-long goal and feeling better about my self image and identity, as you stated, this 'inner peace'.
Okay, now I'm starting to think I might have OCD.. Idk though.
I'll name off some stuff that makes me think I could possibly have it.. a lot of it sounds stupid though.. =/
It's mainy germs for me.. I will NOT touch anything dirty or that I feel has germs on it.
When I go in a public restroom, I never touch the door handle to leave the bathroom with my bare hand.. I wither use a paper towel or my shirt.
With the paper towel dispenser, I always pull it once with my hand and then pull off a small piece of paper towel, then I use that to pull the handle down.. cause I'm afraid to touch the handle on the paper towel dispenser cause I think it's disgusting and dirty.
I usually never do yard work without yard gloves.
I am constantly pulling the colar of my shirt foward.. so now, most of my shirts are stretched at the colar.
I use a lot of soap when I wash my hands.. sometimes I do wash them till they become raw, but they get raw easily cause I have egzama on my wrists and hands.
Now, the one I'm about to tell you is the most bizarre and worst.. you guys might laugh.. =/ but here it goes...
All day, I am for some reason saying "I'm sorry God." I feel like if I don't aplologize to God every second of the day, I've somehow sinned.. I don't say it outload.. kind of just think it to myself.. but I annoy myself with it, but I seriously can't help it.. I've tried to ignore it and stop.. but then I feel like I am somehow sinning if I don't do it..
Btw, you guys are the only one's I've told this too.. I'd feel dumb telling anyone else..
Sorry for the long post.
As an avid bike rider i'd say no it isn't OCD. It's just
love of biking.
Hi Absalom, i highly doubt you have OCD. Trust me, there is nothing glamorous or 'cool' about OCD. If i could have one day in my life without constant bugging in my head i would be at ease and very relaxed. You sound like you have many mental disorders such as Aspherger's, blind face identity thingo and many allergies.
As Nick stated, you merely sound like an avid and very motivated bike rider. You love riding so much that you will go out of your way to make sure you do it everyday. This may also be a habit or routine for you in your life. Just like waking up and having a shower, in my case. So relax and don't worry, no OCD here.
You've probably tried this already, but why not ride an exercise bike on rainy days?
At the level that I exercise an exercise bike is impractical, due to leg cramping and overheating. (For the average person, a 15 minute workout on an exercise bike can be practical.) I need 90 minutes of exercise per day to keep migraines under control. (Migraine prevention medicine could easily kill me due to heart arrythmia.) A stationary bike workout 90 minutes in length can cause my body temperature to reach 103 degrees F even with a fan on me. I am unable to ride if the outdoor temperature is even 80 degrees F, again due to overheating. I take my bike in my car to the shoreline on warm days.
Absalom
Think Adrian Monk on USA Fridays at 10pm. An excellent show
if you haven't checked it out.
OMG that's exactly what i suffer from. For example: i always twitch my eyes repetidly in a pattern everytime i wake up in the mornings...and there are more that are just too complex to state. I always have thaught this as being something i only suffered from...i never knew it would be so common.
I've been lurking for a long long time and your post made me want to come out and talk.
I've had OCD for as long as I can remember...
I used to always check my locker comb. in high school like 5 times when I locked it just so that it would be locked right
I worry Obbsesantly about what my friends are doing at all times, I am a constant worry wort and fearer of the future.
I am not socialiable, and if I am it usually is awkward, see my past posts about gf's ect.
I can somewhat understand what your going through, I'm more of a puro ocd type and not so much concerned with numbers.
BE strong man, we are here for you...from my experience zoloft works ok at curbing obsessions although I'm pretty extreme with mine, so it's always a battle.
yea i had some wierd ass ocd type things like toenail picking and a couple more wierd things like haveing to click the adjacent mouse button if i use the other.........i find it only happens when my mind isnt busy with things or am unhappy
perhaps longhair have ocd and that other face memory thing in a previous thread because we want longhair and dont always grow it right away due to social or whatever reasons and problems appear out of unhappiness because we cant express ourselves how we want.....
just a random idea
Well, another of my Achilles heels!
This OCD stuff is like a living hell sometimes. I definitely know where you are coming from. I don't have enough time to even go into it all even if I had all day to type. I thought I would outgrow it too, but it is so insidious it just seems to change over time and change into different things, ritualistic behavior, etc.
Checking locks, washing hands, arranging objects a certain way, this not touching that, re-checking locks, cleaning things, irrational fears of this substance or that thing touching that realistically could never hurt you, folding clothes a certain way...
I get so f'ing sick of it sometimes!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry this bothers you too. But I just don't want to take any drugs for it, maybe it would help though. Sometimes, it might could even be advantagous, that's a stretch though.
See ya, Bragi
Sorry to hear you also have OCD, Bragi.
I know exactly what you mean. OCD reincarnates into different shapes and forms throughout time. I used to be obsessed that i had AIDS for some reason because i thought i might have touched blood with an open cut on my finger. Fear, paranoia, depression, anxiety, these can all be by-products of OCD.
OCD is insidious and it does consume the sufferer.
Is there anything you do to control or tame the compulsions?
For me, i find something pheruophetic(spelling?) like patting my dog, going for a bike ride, or having a bath relieves me of stress which in turn can lower the intensity of my OCD.
I don't think there are any real advantages of having OCD.
Anyways, take care, Bragi.
The only way I have found to control a compulsion or stop it is just by de-sensitization, i.e. if you fear, just for example, touching newspapers?, get one and wrap it around your hands and arms and just look at it and leave it there for a few minutes, or leave something you would normally clean or straighten dirty and messy, and you will see that nothing bad will happen as a result or no harm will come to you. I've never really told anyone about this either like you said, because I know it's so stupid to do it, but at the same time, you just can't let it all go totally. And if you have people around you, you are much less likely to engage in the OCD activity, for lack of a better term, feeling odd, stnading there making sure a door is locked for 15 minutes.
80's metal,
I understand your discomfort with discussing your condition. So if you would like to IM me on AIM my screen name is "LooKcloser1827". However, yes, from what you describe it seems like very diagnosable OCD. Theres one thing I want to sya to you specifically and to the entire board as a whole. If you think there might be something psychological that is causing any type of discomfort in your life, or dysfunction that inhibits your daily activities, please please please go and seek out a little help. You'd be amazed at how much a good psychologist can help you change your life, and make the suffering go away.
Psychologists exist because we serve a purpose to help people like you who don't deserve to suffer from any type of mental anguish, ignore any societal stigmas against seeing a therapist, they can help, and your life will be better for it.
IM me at LooKcloser1827 if anyone wants. There's no need to suffer when there's proven ways to make the suffering stop.
Hi Rome,
I second your post. No-one needs to suffer on a long-term base from this condition. There are a number of simple, straight-forward, and very effective methods, mainly in the realm of behavioral therapy (much less in the realm of psychoanalysis), to tackle OCD. If it's really bad, a prescription drug may be added temporarily, until the healing effects of psychotherapy kick in. Even for people without appropriate health insurance, the money spent on psychotherapy for OCD is well spent - and many universities have good psychologist-counselers.
- That's what I remember from med school about OCD, and OCD therapy has advanced since that time.
Greetings,
Hans-Uwe
Yeah CBT (Cognitive behavioral therapy) is definitely the way to go. I should have been more specific.
80's metal,
CBT is very, very cost effective, especially for a codition like OCD. Other forms of therapy like talk-therapy/psychoanalysis take years to have effects and are crazy expensive. Stay away from those :)
CBT is proven to relieve symptoms of OCD at the very worst.
Hi Rome,
Thanks for the helpful advice. I might enquire into a psychologist to see if behvioural therapy works. I am unsure whether the public health system in Australia provides
these services. I canno't afford to spend large sums of money on this. I will have to find out i guess.
I don't use AIM, just standard email.
my email is stringmaster5@hotmail.com
Thanks.
I started medication 15 months ago. I feel much better now!
When my OCD was at its worst, I could check doors more than 200 times. Then I finally realised I needed help...
High!
I myself suffered terribly from obsessions and compulsions from the age of 16 to 20 (1985 to 1989), after that I underwent a 5-month stationary therapy in a mental clinic, which involved also a medication (perphenazine and clomipramihydrochloride) which I take since then.
Back then, the subjects of my obsessions primarily were incest, Hitler, the Holocaust and Satan - I was not brought up in a religious environment, instead I deliberately chose the latter issue as the ultimate horror, getting lost to the overwhelming power of all-encompassing evil (Shakespearian notions about good and evil "helped" a lot, back then in 12th high school grade Macbeth was on the curriculum of advanced English classes).
Also, I never experienced real sexual abuse by my mother or other relatives, but as a child, I often felt lost in a hostile outside world of peers and huddled for comfort into a very close mother-tie, which even lead to the impossibility of sleeping alone in my bed.
Only at the age of 11 this gave way in the wake of approaching puberty; from then on (it was also the time when I firstly discovered my erotical fascination with bearded and long-haired men) it changed to anxiously keeping the distance to my parents, with awakening male sexuality, I found nothing more disgusting and humiliating than to stay in this suffocating, infantilizing mother-tie, so it almost inevitably became my first obsessive "theme" when OCR fully broke out in summer of 1985.
I then also developed compulsory rituals like avoiding triangular structures like roots etc. on the ground (reminding me of a maternal vagina) and very soon also counting and action-aborting rituals - any trivial action (like walking through a door) which was "contaminated" by obsessive thoughts had to be aborted and restarted a certain number of times.
Later, theses "number rules" became more mathematically complex: a repeating ritual was only correctly observed when its number of repeats divided or multiplied by an integer power of 2 (i. e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32...) was lower than 33 or higher than 45 (you know, the dates of the Nazi regime in Germany).
If I failed to fulfil the requirements of these rituals, I feared to become a new Hitler later in my life, feared to "automatically" sign a satanic pact, or even feared to "invoke" a new Holocaust (not necessarily in the immediate future, perhaps even a parallel universe).
At times I became so lost in these obsessions, that I was hardly responsive anymore, my head was just ringing "Satan... Auschwitz... Satan... Auschwitz... "... afterwards, I wonder how I could finish high school with a comparatetively good diploma under these circumstances!
After the five months in the hospital, my state improved remarkably; the obsessive thought impulses existed forth (and do so until today), but rarely start those terrible obsession-compulsion-chain reactions like before.
But during the following years a deep general pessimism and distrust regarding my own ability to cope with life (and, especially, to follow my dreams of REAL life, i. e. roaming the planet in months- or even years-long journeys on my own in 60s/70s hippie globetrotter style, of course travelling to my "promised land", Afghanistan, finding the long-haired moustached "swamp gypsy" of my wildest erotic dreams to live with him, enter the "alternative community" of Germany) and society in general surfaced.
During the 90s my studies at university only slowly progressed with most jobs turning utter failures (never stayed anywhere longer than two months), so I increasingly felt victimized by globalization and neoliberalism... I painted grim pictures of the future world in my mind, a mercyless turbo-capitalist hell on Earth, a world wide extermination camp with 99.99 per cent of humankind reduced to absolute slavery, if not simply to Soylent Green.
Discouraged by my parents, I dropped off university and started jobbing as a working poor (whose numbers in Germany are constantly on the rise), living in a small apartment in a redneck suburb of Cologne, dominated by pimped BMWs and annoyingly booming bass boosters...
...and the Internet became a playground for my hopeless view of the world, especially after 9-11 (which, on the other hand, drastically changed the perspective for Afghanistan in a way that the country finally may become accessible for me)... global war on terror... Orwellian technocracy... new plagues like bird flu... global warming... the looming Yellowstone supervolcano eruption... and, and, and...
Sometimes, cynicism and overall world-hate ride me amok, then I just would like to wait for the 10-kilometer dino killer asteroid which rids Gaia of homo "sapiens"...
See you in Khyberspace!
Yadgar
Hi Yadgar,
Thanks for sharing your story with us.
It must be very hard to talk about something like this to others. Your OCD sounded like it was much worse than what i have. What embedded these evil thoughts in your mind, such as Hitler and Satan?
Your outlook on life was very pessimistic and doomed. The destruction of the entire human race. I believe you had other mental disorders than just simply OCD.
I'm glad that your problem is under control now.
Regards, Jean.
High!
My compulsory longing for fear and suffering... I just looked for the most horrifiying things in our culture! Must be a kind of psychical masochism...
Yes, also a personality disorder somewhere between schizoid and borderline was diagnosed...
The OCD is mostly under control now, but not the underlying personality disorder... there are days when hardly anything goes right, when I miss the train, my bike collapses under my weight, my computer crashes senselessly and media horror (globalization, terrorism and all that crap) floods my mind, then I just cry for the gas chamber or a euthanasia injection!
When I was younger (10-12) I used to make lists of what I wanted to do during the week. I would write the list and then go over it again and again and again.
Eventually I was doing this so often that I knew I had to forcibly stop myself.
It took a few months, but I willed this compulsion to go away.
The only remaining evidence of this former compulsion of mine, is that I still make lists today. Except these current lists span my future plans, usually a few years in advance.
Life is unpredictable though and plans change, so I do make new lists every couple years or so.
Yet, sometimes I feel like I am not 'living in the moment', but rather planning for future moments.
Once again I am not happy about this and I am making a conscious effort at the moment to change this.
As a result while I still have long-term life, career and relationship goals, I am enjoying each day more fully on its own terms.
What can I say? I am a work in progress!
(and 80's don't feel embarrased to get professional help, or to speak to your parents-break down those self-imposed barriers. Doctors, psychologists etc. are trained to help people and your parents love you unconditionally and want only the best life for you, I am sure.)
Hi 80s,
Don't know if I "officially" (clinically) have OCD; but I'll certainly admit to having many behaviors that sure sound like it (lol!)!!
- Ken
lol the buzzboarders would have a field day if they read this
i guess everyone has some form of ocd.............im glad ive settled down with it because i would have hated to have to see a professional
