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When and how did you notice you had ocd


Guest Tulsas

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Can anyone tell me how or when their ocd started.Or when they first realised their ocd was getting out of hand.The reason I am asking is because I went out one night 9 years ago on my birthday and was feeling really low because of some news I just had.My friend offered me some speed (amphetimines),which I had never tried before and eventually I got hooked...Anyway, one day I took some speed and had a very severe panic attack and days later this was followed by severe depression...all these feelings were new to me.I really wanted to die.I never knew a person could feel so bad. I have always had a slight touch of ocd since I was a child but it wasn't anything that affected my life because it was so mild.Annoying but mild...Horrible thoughts or doing things like turning the lights or tv off and on until I had a thought that I felt was ok..As a teenager the ocd just went.I was going night clubbing, football, learning to drive and girls..Anyway after I had the panic attacks and depression,one day whilst I was having dinner with my family,a really horrible feeling came over me and to this day I cannot explain how it felt.It was one of the worst feelings possible.It was like a mixture of depression,panic and a churning stomach all rolled into one.From that exact moment all the ocd I had as a child exploded in one go.The compulsion to think horrible thoughts,the compulsion to do things people wouldn't dream of doing..The worst one was having a compulsion to criss cross my eyes (when you see double) and for some reason I couldn't stop.Anyway I want to know how you notice your ocd got out of hand because although mine came back in a big way to play a major factor in my life it was only after I had taken amphetimines.I was told by a Dr and a Counciller it was always lying on the surface and was going to happen but the amphetimines just speeded up the process...and if anyone without ocd is reading this can we swap brains for a day...I could do with a break...

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Guest lilyelspeth

Hi and welcome to the board.

I realised I had OCD at about 15. I never knew there was a title for what I did so I just thought I was crazy. The first thing I noticed was that when someone would touch me, I would have to make that touch feel right myself, even it out if necessary. But my OCD began very early on with the step on a crack idea. I could not walk on cracks or painted lines on the road as I would have to go back and start my walk all over again. My obsessions did not start to be a problem until I was about 12 when my parents seperated. It was then I learned what worry was.

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Guest napo100383

I was perfect feeling great with life and then,,,

I watched a made for TV movie where this guy kills his parents and was terrified that i could do the same petrified,i went to bed and said i would be better in the morning the next day i felt awful i couldnt get it outta my head and three years later it is till coming and going but at least i know what it is cos i thought for a year that i was just plain crazy,

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Interresting topic.

The name OCD (and all it stands for) I have known about for two years or so. But I have had it for more than 20 years.

I remember I saw a program on fires as a kid. Don't know exactly when, but after that I started checking if everything was ok before I went to bed. The strange thing was that I still couldn't be satisfied eventhough I was staring at the potential hasard (and everything was fine) for minutes. That could be a socket; and if something was too close to it. If the curtain was covering the heater. If something was touching the lamp!!!!!

One day, it was the monday after my 10th (I think) bithday, I went to school. I fell and hurt myself, and *bam* there and then I hated school. School was dirty.

I used to wash school away after I came home. I also couldn't stand the thought that I had left anything behind in this evil school so I started checking after me when I left school if I had dropped something; so it took me forever to leave. I can remember once I saw somebody's sock. Fearing that it was mine I picked it up and brought it with me (there my OCD has changed sinced then; this I could NEVER have done now). I think I even brought a lump of dust home once.

For a long time everything related to this school was dirty and my OCD was more or less focused on that. It was a Steiner Waldorf School (where people often could dress a bit alternatively), so for years I hated people who dressed like that. Or similar. They were dirty.

There were a few other places I disliked which after a while got a ceirtain dirty thing about them. One was a psychologist my parents sent me to. Hehe, bad luck, I didn't stay there long; perhaps because I didn't feel I had a problem, or that I didn't want to be a "crazy" kid seeing a psychologist.

I had a few other ticks, like I always had to be clean if I was going to do something I enjoyed, like washing hands before seeing a film (no problems with using the sink in public toilets then - or the urinals), putting on clean clothes before going to the disco (now it would be the opposite).

Later on this more and more morphed into a fear of body liquids (I'm fine with the school now; I even have kids in my family going to the same school; but to be honest; a bit of it is still slightly there, packed away some school books from there recently and I felt I had to wash my hands still - and I did; perhaps I am blaming them for my OCD).

Three years ago I had a bad time working in a terrible place, living ****, hating the city, and the OCD escalated to the extreme. Before that I could manage eventhough it involved some cleaning once in a while and quite some handwashing. but there are things I did four-five years ago I could never do today.

Now it's a hassle to just go outside (I work from home, so I don't even have to).

But, hey, I am fighting it now! :) It's been there too long. Time to get normal.

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Howdy,

I think that i am probably one of many people on this board who has been misdiagnosed perhaps by the system. My first contact with the world of mental health came when i was 22. I was having trouble getting over a relationship and my family life was not so hot either. So naturally the psychiatrist thought that a course of medication would relieve my depression. Within a couple of years though this had morphed onto hypocondriasis and anxiety. At this point you can throw in a lot more medication, therapy and anxiety management classes. I guess this laid the foundations for dealing with my anxiety, but i did kinda notice that for all the tools i had for coping really weren't getting rid of my thoughts. The stuck record element of this struck a chord with me. As i was a regular surfer of websites to check my health out i came across more and more websites suggesting hypochondriasis and ocd were not mutually exclusive.

I like to think of myself as an ocder now, and have been so for two years. Yet it was me that went to the doctors and psychiatrists with this self diagnosis, and rather strangely they agreed with me. you must remember most times i went to the doctors it was usually about digestive problems, heart failure, schizophrenia, bipolar and other things that we both knew was not really happening.

I often wonder how my recovery would have been if i had been diagnosed that little bit earlier? What would the treatment have been like 10 years ago? What would be like now? I've given a lot of time away to this illness, and i suppose battle hard to get my life on an even keel. Some days i am good, some not so good. Still i do think i have come on leaps and bounds over the past year or so. Part of my recovery i guess is that i try to make the ocd 'work' for me. I like being involved in the board and also attending self help groups. To some that might sound strange. But if it keeps my ocd in check and allows me tohelp others who may be doing far worse than i am then surely that has to be a positive to come out of this bloody awful condition.

See ya

Adam

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Hi Tulsas and wlecome along to the board :)

Good question!

I started showing signs of OCD when I was about 4 years old I guess (more or less from the moment I started school) - looking back now all the signs were glaringly obvious that I had it, I had obsessive eating patterns, unnatural (for someone so young) preoccupations with germs and certain ritual questions I had to ask my parents over and over again in order to feel 'calm', also what I recognise as my first pure 'o' moment was when I was about 6 years old.

I can remember the day when things changed and started to get really bad and out of control for me, I was about 12 and it really upsets me to talk about it still (the incident that occured would probably seem really really trivial if I was to tell you about it, but even so...).

It took me 11 years and two breakdowns to get help and a diagnosis (I'm 25 now) - and I'm still a long way off being anywhere near better.

Really really hope you enjoy being part of the boards, Tulsas - there's some lovely folks on here and always someone around to help should you need it!

Take care :(

Queenie

xx

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Guest Dennis912

Hey guys -

I can remember the exact moment I realized I had ocd, I can go into detail but I

can write for hours..

OCD is a crappy thing - never stop fighting it.. Donot run from your thoughts

they will catch you, if you continue your compulsions you will just get worse....

Wow that is soooo easy to write, I just wish it was that easy to do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why would you want to swap brains with someone who didn't have OCD

OCD people are: very kind

very creative

very sensitive

Dennis.. :blushing:

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Guest Beckett93

My first experience with OCD came in 1979, when I was four. I didn't know it was OCD at the time (how could I?), but that's what it was. My family were Southern Baptists and that's kind of a fire and brimstone religion. I can remember them saying that the devil would try and tempt people and always be wary of the devil. It was the middle of summer and one day the thought just popped into my head "You love the devil" and it stuck. I was scared I would go to hell for having those thoughts and I cried and cried. One night I was in bed and my mother heard me crying and when she asked me what was wrong, I told her I was having bad thoughts and she said to try and think of something happy, like playing with butterflies outside or throwing my baseball. It didn't work, but I found that if I furrowed my brow, it took so much concentration to do that I couldn't think of the bad thoughts. Then one day my dad asked me what I was doing making that face and told me to stop and it got better, somewhat. Then when I started Kindergarten, I wouldn't wear certain clothes because they were "bad luck" and I couldn't go out the door without asking my mother the same set of questions every day, covering every detail of my trip to school, the schoold day, and the trip home. In the lower grades, if I didn't get perfect scores on tests, I cried. I would get so nervous before them that my hands would shake. The funny thing is, I did so well academically because of the OCD, the school said I was "gifted" :lol: When I was 14, getting ready to start high school, the religious thoughts came back and I spent the entire 3 months of summer vacation thinking "12345678910 I love Jesus, I love God, block it out" to keep the bad thoughts about the devil out. Then that year, I loaned my pencil to a girl who had a cold. I remember sitting in class, watching her wipe her nose on the back of the same hand she used to write with my pencil. Between classes, I took the pencil into the restroom and washed it with hot water and soap, while some of my classmates asked why I was doing that. I wouldn't use the high school restrooms for bodily functions, because they were dirty, so I went in my pants (#2). And it got worse. The next year, I was at the water fountain next to an effeminate boy who everyone thought was gay. Water from his fountain splashed out and touched my hand. And within a year, that one drop of water had contaminated my whole world. I washed my hands at least 25 times every time I was at the sink. I had use an entire bottle of shampoo every time I washed my hands. If my clothes touched the floor I could not wear them. I threw out most of my belongings and wouldn't get my hair cut, because the guy said he was a "stylist" instead of a barber and I thought that meant he was gay and had AIDS. My mom said she knew I needed help, but my dad said it would be an embarassment to the family for his son to go to a psychiatrist. He called a Christian radio station and had them pray for me. I was isolated an depressed. In my junior year of high school, I was so depressed I thought it would be better to die than go on living like that. So I quit washing my hands and all of that, thinking I would soon die of AIDS. But I didn't die and I got better. I still didn't drive, but I had friends and I spent time with them and was happy, with the exception of my dad finding out he had leukemia and spending the next two years watching him die slowly. After he died, I went to various universities and went back to needing perfect scores to not feel like a failure. Then the worst OCD episode I ever had came about. It was my last year at the university. I was home one weekend and went back to learn that a fellow student had been murdered while walking his girlfriend home and she had been stabbed in the throat, but survived. A migrant worker who later turned out to be a serial killer, Rafael Resendez Ramirez, had killed them, but it took two years for him to be caught and in the days after the crime, no one knew it was him. I had an astronomy class in the evenings that required me to take the campus shuttle back to my apartment. I was waiting for the shuttle one night and two other students were talking to me about the crime. I thought to myself "they shouldn't be talking to me, because I"m a stranger and for all they know I did it" and the "I did it" stuck. And it snowballed. I thought I was going insane and made plans to burn my hands in the oven so I couldn't hurt anyone if I lost my mind. I started worrying I would make threats, lay waiting in the darkness to attack people, or tell cashiers at stores that "this is a stick up." I called my mom to come and get me and I had dropped out of school within the week, never to return. For the next year, I hid in my sister's basement, scared to be around people, and doing things like pulling hair off the floor with tape to keep everything tidy. My sister said that she saw me re-arranging things in my closets at least once a day "to maximize space." But then I started to feel better again, so I went to a local school called a community college. And it all fell apart again. One Labor Day of 1998, I called my grandma to take me to the hospital. I was in agony and I wanted shock treatments or to just die. The doctor, bless his heart, knew it was just anxiety, gave me a prescription for Xanax, and told me to see a psychiatrist. And it was that doctor who finally diagnosed me and helped me to get better, not cured, but at least better than what I was.

Sorry for writing so much, but that's my story in brief. All the detail wasn't necessary, but I hope that someone out there who might not know for certain they have OCD can look at and say "I've do something just like that. I've got OCD" and know that they aren't crazy, or bad, or dangerous.

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