Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder “(OCD) creates a pattern of false or unwanted thoughts in your mind that make you repeat the same things, tasks and behaviors. The repetitive behaviors are actually the result of obsessions and are known as compulsions. The combined effects of obsessions and compulsions cause a chaotic change in your routine life that often lead to a great disaster. Since this is a mental condition, you may need medication or therapeutic sessions from a psychotherapist. For better outlook the OCD must be treated soon.
If not treated timely, you may feel driven to do compulsive acts to release your anxiety. Even after trying hard you would fail to defeat the bothersome urges or thoughts. Thus you entered a vicious cycle of OCD that leads you to act based on ritual. OCD makes you frightened of certain things like germs around you. You may feel fear of getting contaminated by the germs found in surroundings. To make your mind stress free, you start washing your hands over and over again. Over-washing makes your hands chapped and sore. This is the start of OCD. People often get ashamed when they’re diagnosed with OCD. Therefore, they feel embarrassed when they talk about it. But the good news is, you can get rid of this obsessive condition through a proper treatment.
What is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)?
The behavioral and mental condition that causes you to repeat some specific acts over and over again to satisfy your frustrated thoughts, is known as obsessive-compulsive disorder. You experience frequent unwanted and unnecessary sensations or feelings that significantly interfere with your ability to socialize and interact with others. It also affects your ability to perform daily tasks. Although it’s a life-long mental condition, you can overcome the symptoms with the help of therapy sessions and medications.
It will be astonishing to hear that everyone in their life comes across with this type of obsessions. For example you will have observed that your mother often double checks the locks and stoves. Studies show that OCD is more serious than normal obsession or obsessed ones as you use in your routine conversations. It affects a person’s life badly and one can take hours to come out from a specific obsession. These obsessions are not full of amazement or enjoyment. These are unwanted and male you tired.
What is the Difference between OCD and OCPD?
People often get confused about OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) or OCPD (obsessive-compulsive personality disorder). Although they seem similar when pronounced, in reality both are different conditions.
OCPD is a condition that affects your personality. It induces extreme organization, control, perfectionism and preoccupation in your personality while OCD is less severe than OCPD because people affected by OCD are fully aware about their obsession and compulsions. They know it very well that their such habits are irritating and problematic for others and for themselves as well. They openly talk about their irritating obsession and accept that they need some professional therapy or medications to treat the condition. But people with OCPD never accept the reality. They don’t accept that they are suffering from a personality disorder and they never agree that there’s anything problematic in their acts and behaviors.
What Type of People Get Affected by OCD?
There’s no specification for the victims of OCD. It can affect any of you at any stage of life. According to study, more than 50% of people with OCD started experiencing symptoms of OCD in their childhood or early adolescence, i.e between 15 to 20 years. Studies also show that it’s rare to see a person developing OCD symptoms after the age of 35.
Is OCD a Common Condition?
According to studies, OCD is a common disorder. It usually affects people in their early stages of life. Surveys verify that 3.5 to 4.5% of the population of the country is generally experiencing the OCD symptoms.
Symptoms of OCD
Obsessions and compulsions caused by OCD not only affect your normal life activities but also after your relationships with clothes. The symptoms act like hurdles in doing your work on time. You may get late from your job and prefer to lay in the bed even after waking up for enough time. Thus the start of the day brings chaos in your life.
People often know about their problematic habits but they don’t know how to treat them. In addition, the symptoms of OCD do not remain permanent. They may come and go and often become easier over time or worsen for some time. If you are experiencing OCD symptoms in yourself or in your loved one, you need to talk to your healthcare provider on an emergency basis.
Obsession in OCD
Unwanted, intrusive thoughts are known as obsessions. You may see mental images that can cause anxiety and depression. As an OCD patient you cannot control such thoughts. You may often take such thoughts irrational or illogical.
Common examples of OCD obsessions include:
- Fear of making mistakes unconsciously.
- Need of constant reassurances.
- Developing feelings of disgust or doubt.
- Fear of making contact with perceived contaminated substances, such as dirt, dust or germs.
- Extreme desire for symmetry, discipline, perfection and neatness.
- Unwanted thoughts related to sex.
- Fear of causing harm to yourself or someone else.
- Become violent on ordinary things or acts from others.
- Excessive concern with moral values.
Compulsions in OCD
Repetitive actions that often you do to get rid of obsessions or make your symptoms of OCD easy are called compulsions in OCD. If you’re suffering from OCD , you will better understand that you often don’t want to perform such repetitive activities and the repetitions of such acts or behaviors don’t make you happy. But you may feel helpless and feel bound to do these things over and over again. If you don’t do repetitive actions, your anxiety may get worse. However, compulsions only help you temporarily. The obsessions even come back after doing repetitive acts. Compulsions often cause wastage of time and you often get late for performing the actual duties where your presence is necessary.
More explanative examples of compulsions include:
- Constantly seeking attention and reassurance.
- Collecting unnecessary articles that have no personal or economical values.
- Arranging the things in a specific way repetitively, such as items on your dresser, shelves or cupboards.
- Repeating certain words when performing some tasks.
- Having rituals related to numbers, like avoiding certain numbers or choosing certain numbers while counting for some reasons.
- Washing or bathing your hands or body over and over.
- Constantly checking if you harm or hurt someone.
- Constantly checking things like locks, stoves or switches.
Compulsions in OCD also prevent facing the things or situations that can trigger obsessions. People with OCD also avoid touching things that other people touch a lot, like doorknobs or switches. This is another type of compulsion. They also avoid shaking hands.
Types of OCD
Obsessions and compulsions in OCD often follow a specific rhythm. This rhythm helps us identify the types of OCD. Otherwise,no clinical study helps you in this regard. So, the types of OCD include:
Contamination: Fear of getting in touch with the things that may have dirt or germs on them is the contamination fear. People with OCD refuse to make contact with the things which are in public use, including switches, doorknobs or toilets. This obsession often makes you lonely because you often avoid gatherings.
Symmetry: You may feel an intense need to arrange things in a specific manner. It often shows repetitive actions or compulsive counting. You always want to put things in a lined up position. This obsession sometimes gets worse and adopts a horrifying shape when you start believing that tapping the table a certain number of times will save someone from dying.
Checking: This is the worst type of OCD. because this triggers anxiety and depression. You often have fear of doing anything wrong. You may always remain worried that you’ve done something wrong to someone or something bad is going to happen. Therefore, you don’t believe in yourself and repeat things over and over again which you have already done.
Intrusive Thoughts and Ruminations: Having violent thoughts is another type of OCD. If you have a n obsession with a line of thoughts that can be disturbing, talk to your healthcare provider.
Postpartum OCD: After pregnancy, women often experience a lot of changes in hormones plus they have a great increase in responsibilities as a mother. These features cause OCD in them. Postpartum OCD causes behaviors or thoughts in females that makes them fearful and irritating. For example they have constant fear that something bad will happen to their baby or they start sanitizing or washing baby items repetitively.
However, it is also a reality that almost all new parents have some type of anxiety about their babies because this is the first time. But in people with OCD, the symptoms of anxiety get worse and become a hurdle in living a normal life.
Pandas: Studies show that a type of OCD that often affects children is caused by a streptococcus bacteria. Researchers say that in this type of OCD streptococcal infection actually affects the baby’s autoimmune system and causes pediatric autoimmune psychiatric disorders (PANDAS). Its symptoms come suddenly, often soon after an infection such as scarlet fever or sore throat. Symptoms of PANDAS not only appear dramatically but a;so include both verbal and physical symptoms, like clinginess and irritability. Taking antibiotics to treat strep throat may help relieve PANDAS symptoms in babies but sometimes standard treatment for the obsessions and compulsions is needed.
Causes of OCD
As OCD still has no clinical basis, therefore, researchers don’t have the exact clues to describe the causes of OCD. but according to their research, some factors have been identified as contributing factors to the development of OCD. These factors include:
Genetics: This fact explains that if your first-degree relatives like parents or siblings have OCD symptoms, you’re at higher risk of developing the OCD condition. If your relatives had developed the symptoms in the early childhood or teenage, your OCD may worsen and chances of getting affected with OCD would be increased.
Childhood Traumas: Certain childhood traumas have also been thought to be the cause of OCD. experiencing negligence or abusing behaviors during childhood causes development of OCD.
Brain Changes: Research has been claimed that some structural changes in the frontal cortex or subcortical parts of your brain can cause OCD symptoms. Certain neurological conditions can also cause OCD , like epilepsy, tourette’s syndrome, and Parkinson disease.
PANDAS Syndrome: Pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder is another cause of OCD development. This disorder often causes OCD in children who had certain infections in their childhood.
Treatment and Management of OCD
Medications and talk therapy (psychotherapy are the most reliable treatment plans for OCD. If these plans don’t work for your relief and your symptoms get more and more severe, you may go for transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) therapy.
Psychotherapy for OCD
This is also known as talk therapy. This is actually a combination of various treatment procedures including identifying, and changing negative, intrusive, thoughts, behaviors and emotions. Your mental healthcare provider works with your symptoms to bring the change in them. The most common types of psychotherapy for OCD include:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
In this technique, your psychotherapy helps you identify and understand your disturbing emotions and thoughts. After certain sessions, CBT proves helpful in stopping and altering the harmful thoughts. You may also become able to replace such thoughts with healthier ones.
Exposure and Response Prevention
This is another form of CBT. In the ERP technique your therapist helps you expose yourself to the images and situations that make you frightened and insecure. They may ask you to touch dirty things and then don’t let you wash your hands. When you throw such a feared situation without anything bad happening, you get courage to have exposure to such things and situations that had made you fearful.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
This technique helps you admit the compulsive and obsessive thoughts and then getting power to go away from them. The therapist helps you how to live a purposeful life without any destructive thought.
Medications for OCD
Antidepressants like serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) or selective SRIs are the type of medications that can help treat OCD. The FDA approved medications for OCD include:
- Fluvoxamine.
- Sertraline.
- Fluoxetine.
- Paroxetine.
It is important to remember that it takes 4 to 5 months for these medications to show results.
Conclusion
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a mental condition that not only disrupts your mental health but also affects your life activities and relations. So it’s necessary, like all other mental health conditions, it should be treated carefully. The in time medical assistance can lessen the disruptions to your life and decrease the severity of symptoms. Ask your healthcare provider what type of treatment plan would be safe for you and go for it as soon as possible.
