Understanding and managing obsessive- compulsive disorder

By James Hewitt - Year 13, South Otago High School

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) - or as I like to call it, ''the biggest pain in my backside ever since I started high school'' - is just one of those mental illnesses that is seriously misunderstood.

There are two parts to OCD - the obsessions and the compulsions.

The obsessions are repetitive and unwanted thoughts, images or impulses that cause anxiety.

Some obsessions might be fear of being contaminated by germs, intrusive sexually explicit thoughts/images, aggressive or disturbing ideas such as thoughts of hurting someone.

The compulsions are repetitive behaviours or thoughts that a person will use to counteract the obsessive thought or feeling.

A person with OCD will feel a sense of responsibility to perform the behaviour as they believe it will prevent harm coming to themselves or loved ones.

Now a mental health expert would explain this differently, but I like to talk about my OCD as two stages.

The first stage started in year 9 when I was a perfectionist and had the compulsion to do things in a specific way.

For example, I had to turn off the bathroom shower tap three times and step out of the shower on a certain angle with the right foot facing in the right direction.

After a few months, my OCD died down, but then in year 10 it suddenly came back and completely caught me off guard.

And this is the second stage. I started getting the disturbing intrusive thoughts.

These were extremely painful to live with.

For instance, I tried staying away from sharp objects out of fear of harming someone.

I would avoid scissors and knives, and would try to avoid handing them to people, because every time I would hand a pair of scissors to someone, I would get the thought that I had just harmed them.

The first stage would drive me crazy, but not to the point that I got depressed.

Whereas, when I started getting the disturbing intrusive thoughts, that was when I couldn't handle it.

Every second of the day was taken up by my head just constantly attacking me with thoughts, and it came to a point where it started affecting my school work and morale.

I eventually got depression, because I believed that I was a bad person.

But this isn't the issue.

When my first stage of OCD occurred, I was aware that it was OCD and it never affected my schoolwork.

The real issue was that when the next stage of OCD came, I was not aware that it was OCD.

And I have the feeling that a lot of people (especially pupils) only understand OCD as being something where you are only a perfectionist and constantly washing hands, like it is portrayed in basically every movie.

The one thing that really helped me to overcome my OCD was to understand that they are just thoughts.

And if there's one thing I've learnt, don't let OCD dictate the way that you live your life.

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