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Don’t know what to do


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Hi

My daughter is 22 and has had contamination OCD since age 13. At Christmas you wouldn’t have noticed her OCD to the point that she was concerned that her every day anxiety was disappearing. When she came back from uni in February her OCD drastically worsened. She receives a phone call every week from uni to talk to their mental health worker and is on the waiting list for NHS therapy.

Over the past 10 weeks she has been having intrusive thoughts every day all day. She is at home all day and is struggling to even make herself a drink. My husband and I come home from work and she has been crying all day. I can’t give her a hug because of her OCD. I can’t make her bed or do washing for her.

We want to do something but don’t know what. Is there any other help out there for her? It is so upsetting to see her like this and frustrating that we can’t help.

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Hi NPG :)

I'm sorry to hear your daughter is struggling so much at the moment. It's great that she's on the waiting list for therapy and getting some support from her university :)

There are a couple of things you could do. You could look into private therapy, if that's something you believe you could afford. It's important to consider the waiting time in your area, because you don't want to start private therapy and then shortly afterwards change therapist when one becomes available on the NHS. For information on private therapy you could look at the OCD-UK website here, 

https://www.ocduk.org/overcoming-ocd/accessing-ocd-treatment/accessing-ocd-treatment-privately/

I also highly recommend the self-help book Break free from OCD by Paul Salkovskis, Fiona Challacombe and Victoria Bream Oldfield. It's written by specialists in the treatment of OCD and takes you through what OCD is, how it's maintained and how to begin tackling it. I recommend that both you and your daughter read it, because it can really help to discuss and understand OCD together.

There is also the forums that she could reach out to for support and OCD-UK are also running online support groups at the moment which your daughter could look into attending. 

https://www.ocduk.org/support-groups/zoom/

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