OCD is debilitating, but there’s hope.
By: Mary Wilson, Opinions Editor
My name is Mary Wilson. I’m 21 years old. I am the Opinions Editor for The Montage, and I have been diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) since I was 8.
For this year’s OCD Awareness Week, I am dedicated to doing my part to smash stigma and break barriers to people receiving effective treatment and support.
Medlineplus.gov defines Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as follows: “a mental disorder in which people have unwanted and repeated thoughts, feelings, ideas, sensations (obsessions) and behaviors that drive them to do something over and over (compulsions.) Often the person carries out the behaviors to get rid of the obsessive thoughts. But this only provides short-term relief. Not doing the obsessive rituals can cause great anxiety and distress.”
Throughout my life, my OCD has ruined friendships, made dating and romantic relationships impossible, put stress on family relationships, burdened my parents, stunted my emotional growth, forced me to reduce my course load and take a semester off to receive intensive treatment at a residential facility, contributed to depression, and made me feel completely, totally hopeless and alone.
I’m terrified to release this article. What will people think of me? Sure, I’ve written about OCD before, but that was different; I didn’t go into any real details, and I glossed over the hard parts.
Skipping over the hard parts makes for bad journalism.
Last semester, I couldn’t even write, one of my biggest joys in life. My OCD manifested as perfectionism, so I wrote and rewrote and deleted and edited and rewrote and got frustrated, until I stopped writing altogether. While I still wrote for The Montage, the quality and quantity of my articles decreased, and what I did manage to churn out took me days of incredible anxiety and frustration. I knew I had to get better when writing a paragraph could take me hours.
For me, the anxiety OCD causes feels like it’s clawing open my chest from the inside. It feels like all the oxygen has been sucked from the air. It feels like I’m drowning in slow motion in six inches of water. It feels like I’m being stabbed over and over, and the only way to make the stabbing stop is to do the compulsion.
The way to break the OCD cycle seems obvious: don’t do the compulsions. That’s the point of Exposure and Response Prevention, the gold-standard treatment for OCD. In ERP, therapists work with patients to gradually trigger their OCD, then sit with the anxiety and uncertainty until the anxiety comes down naturally. Over time, the trigger stops causing anxiety. Patients have to willingly confront the most uncomfortable feelings imaginable, and sit with those feelings, until they’re not distressing anymore.
I’ve done this work before, sometimes doing more than 60 hours of therapy a week in various programs. And it works.
I’m living proof that ERP works, that OCD is treatable and that it’s possible, through hard work and dedication, to lead a fulfilling life. When my OCD was at its worst, when I was 15, I couldn’t see a future for myself. I assumed I would die by my own hand. The fact that I’m alive at 21—and thriving—now is something that 15-year-old Mary would never have believed.
So this OCD Awareness Week, October 9-13, I’m going to celebrate. My OCD will likely relapse in the future. But right now, I’m okay. I’m doing well. And that’s not nothing.
