OCD anyone help??

floyd

P.S This is a very good site for anyone that needs help. The people on the forum are very understanding and not judgemental at all

http://www.ocduk.org/

Bun

Well it sounds as if a lot of us have some symptoms pertaining to ocd or similar.

doraexplorer

i think we all have it a bit . i have a major phobia about crumbs. with 2 kids its a nightmare. i am constantly wandering about with a dustpan and brush .
i hate crumbs . and no matter waht i always see crumbs everywhere. but i dont have a problem with sweeping them up. its a joke with my friends that they invite me for coffee because i sweep up there floor. and i do sweep all there floors . its funny cause my 2 year old daughter has her own dustpan and brush and will sweep up after she has a biscuit. i dont think its ocd i think i am just house proud.

i think as other posters have said we all have things we do. my friend will only drink out of a white cup. my other friend is obsessed with what time it is and she does not wear a watch so is constantly asking what time it is. my other friend will only wear black shoes cause shes got black hair.

the list is endless but we all do it so your not alone i think it makes us feel safe and secure .

crispeater

doraexplorer wrote: »

i think we all have it a bit . i have a major phobia about crumbs. with 2 kids its a nightmare. i am constantly wandering about with a dustpan and brush .

i can just imagine a cowboy like gun belt with a dustpan and brush one side and one of those cordless little dust hoover things on the other


i have a problem with my butter, it has to be spread out of the tub in straight lines and it has to remain even and smooth. i hate other people coming in and making sandwich as they dig a massive hole in the middle! :mad: then it takes me ages to try and get it right again. i also have my tinned food lined up in the cupboard in rows, tomatoes, beans soups all behind each other. the wardrobes are set up with cardigans, then skirts then trousers then tops. i thought i was just being over organised :rotfl:

3KIDSNOMONEY

OCD comes in many variations of severity.

I have been diagnosed with OCD and am currently on a very long waiting list for cognitive therapy. Mine is quite serious and seriously affects mine and my childrens lives. I originally took anti-depressants but want to learn to manage it. It can make life very difficult and I am very concerned about passing my problems onto my kids. I regularly see a psychiatrist.

I think OCD can start in very simple ways, in my case it has always been there but not serious but over the last couple of years spiralled out of control. So i think it is best to get help early on.

tattooedhoney

I wouldn't worry too mych. It sounds like the majority of your "compulsions" are under control.
One oft he main distressing elements of OCD is the intrusive thoughts and ruminations.
My ex BF had very severe OCD. He would not let me touch him in clothes that he had been to work in. Thinking I would then dump him and go off with him. He had to do certain things or people he loved would die ( these were his thought processes)
He washed his hands a lot and would often get cracked dry skin.
In one distressing incident he had what was like a cold sore but as we were in San Fransico ( large gay community) he would not put any blistex on - in case the HIV/ etc got into his system.:mad:
His compulsions and reasoning behind things were so illogical and caused him great stress and turmoil , and would seek reassurance from others about the checking etc.
I think going to visit the GP is a good idea , but if it means you have a clean house and that is the only real side affect then you should be fine !!
there are loads of books support groups for OCD if you are diganosed. One good one is called Tormenting thoughts and rituals- cant remember the author but have it at home. PM if you need the author.

Of course you can pop round to mine and tidy up ( as part of your treatment obviously)
Good luck :A

asea

OCD - article that may be of interest

---

A Q+A with an American expert Judith Rapport

Medscape: Your work has radically changed the way OCD is perceived. Please discuss how and why that is.
Dr. Rapoport: Some classic writing suggested that OCD might be a psychological condition. But a lot of converging bits of information pointed to this as a disease of brain functioning. For example, my research group and I noted that among children with OCD, particularly boys, a very high percentage had motor tics and several went on to have Tourette's disorder.[1] We were among the first to note that there was a genetic relationship to Tourette's disorder. Whether the person with tics has OCD, or the person with Tourette's syndrome has obsessions, it goes together in families.

Around this same time, some of the brain imaging techniques used today were introduced. Our research group was also among the first to show that those with OCD have an increased metabolism in parts of the brain -- namely, the orbital frontal cortex, the caudate, and part of the basal ganglia.[2,3]

Everything came together, and all of a sudden, this supposedly very psychological disorder has become among the best studied neurobiologic disorder.


Medscape: And this different way of thinking about OCD has affected the way it is treated?

Dr. Rapoport: Absolutely. The treatment formerly recommended was insight psychotherapy, which does not have a helpful track record for OCD. But with the enormous increase in recognition of the neurobiology came parallel lines of study. One is the use of drugs, first clomipramine (Anafranil), and then all the other serotonin drugs that came after it, such as fluoxetine (Prozac) and sertroline (Zoloft).[4]

The other was the increase in recognition that behavior therapy was very helpful.[5] That takes a little explaining, because people often use the word psychotherapy to mean many different kinds of non-drug treatments and even behavior therapy has many different kinds of treatments. Weight Watchers, relaxation training, and biofeedback are all behavior therapies, for example, but they do nothing for OCD.

The treatment for OCD is a kind of behavior therapy where the person is exposed to the trigger that sets off the obsession (such as dirt) and then to response prevention, where the person is not allowed to wash for several hours after this exposure. Doing that daily for at least 1 hour over several weeks does bring improvements. The twin findings that behavior therapy worked, and drug treatment worked, have led to resolution of a majority of cases.

Medscape: How often does the treatment work?

Dr. Rapoport: Seventy percent of people who try one or both of these treatments get substantial help. That statistic lumps together people who have tried 2 or 3 different drugs to find the 1 that works best for them, people who have had behavior therapy, and people who have had treatment with both drugs and behavior therapy. This number does not necessarily reflect OCD patients trying just 1 drug and sticking with that, or just doing behavior therapy.

Medscape: Does the fact that OCD responds to either behavior or drug treatment tell us anything about the nature of the disorder?

Dr. Rapoport: Well, that is an important question, and it may be that there is more than one way to reset brain chemistry. Our research group showed that people who respond to clomipramine have a decrease in the caudate nucleus metabolism.[3] More specifically, patterns of cerebral glucose metabolism measured by positron emission tomography (PET) scan go from glowing much higher than the controls to looking quite a bit like controls in particular regions of the brain. There was a classic study done in the 1990s at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),[6] showing that behavior therapy has the same effect, suggesting that both chemical and nonchemical agents can change brain chemistry, and that the brain is capable of learning different patterns.

Medscape: Behavior therapy involves a retraining. What happens with the drugs? Are they effective only as long as the medicine is on board?

Dr. Rapoport: Most people would say that the drug is only temporary -- while the patient is taking it, and that behavior therapy tends to have better transfer to the months after the treatment ends. But I believe that the drug treatment has lasting value as well because it enables people to do their own do-it-yourself behavior therapy -- in other words, being exposed to triggers and not avoiding them while on the medication. They take more risks, get more exposure, no longer avoid going to an office where they might get germs, etc. The drugs allow people to perform these otherwise anxiety-provoking behaviors every day.

Medscape: Given the growing understanding of OCD as a brain disorder, is it increasingly perceived as different from anxiety?

Dr. Rapoport: There is a lot of debate about that. OCD is currently classified as an anxiety disorder, which is not all wrong because these patients become very anxious at the notion of contamination or guilt; but, that classification does not feel quite right. Part of the problem is that, when reviewing the other diagnoses, there is not such a clear place to put OCD. It does not track so much with the other diagnoses. It is very clear, for example, that if a person has a phobia, he may be more likely to have generalized anxiety disorder or something like that. That is not necessarily true of OCD. OCD is comorbid with a variety of conditions including Tourette's syndrome,[7] attention deficit disorder,[8] and depression.[9] It has broad comorbidity across several different categories of disorders. Experts, therefore, are not happy with the anxiety category, but they do not agree on another place to put it.

Medscape: How do the findings on OCD help define it in contrast to other disorders?

Dr. Rapoport: The specificity of the treatments is not so clear. The drugs that help OCD tend to be pretty good for depression and anxiety of other kinds.

In brain imaging studies, the circuits between the basal ganglia and the frontal lobes seem to come up over and over in a number of different disorders; for example, other anxiety disorders,[10] attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,[11] Tourette's disorder,[12] maybe some of the mood disorders.[13] There is some specificity for the patterns, and people are impressed with subtle abnormalities of the orbital frontal and the caudate in those with OCD, but there is still a puzzle as to how much is nonspecific and what areas are specific to OCD.

On the other hand, when researchers have done some linkage studies, looking for genes using deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA) in families of people with OCD, they seem to have a locus on chromosome 9 that does not seem to go with the other disorders.[14]

Medscape: Has research told us more about the role of serotonin in OCD?

Dr. Rapoport: Everyone agrees that serotonin seems to play a role. There have been other studies for people who get only a partial response to a serotonin medicine, showing that someone can take a very low dose of a second kind of medicine -- a dopamine blocker -- and get much more of a response, or sometimes even convert from being a non-responder to a responder.[15] For a good chunk of patients, maybe 25%, the addition of this dopamine-affecting drug may be important. Dopamine and serotonin have a sort of seesaw relationship between each other and the brain, so this may be saying something about the relationship of dopamine to OCD.

There have been a series of studies in the last 5 to 7 years using spectral magnetic resonance spectroscopy in which levels of different chemicals within the brains of those with OCD has been shown; the results point to the possibility that there are differences in the brains of OCD patients with respect to the neurotransmitter glutamate.[16] Based on that question, there is a research study at Yale on a glutamate receptor drug that, by report, is also having some effect on OCD.[17] The effect is not strong, but it may be effective for some patients.

Medscape: There seems to be a lot of ongoing research. Can you comment on some additional significant findings?

Dr. Rapoport: One of the subgroups of OCD currently under investigation is a group called pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infection or PANDAS.[18] These are young children with OCD who often have tics as well. While controversial, there is some evidence that a small number of very vulnerable children may develop this condition in response to streptococcal infection. The antibodies may attack the caudate, the basal ganglia, or another area of the brain that seems to be involved much of the time.

Another, very different, type of research regarding the treatment of OCD is one of the last strongholds of psychosurgery. The ideal double-blind controlled studies have not been done to test this theory, but some experts think that there are convincing case reports of extraordinarily severe cases of OCD being helped by a particular surgical procedure.[19] The lesions created by the operation interrupt the hyperactive circuit between the basal ganglia and the frontal lobes, the caudate and the orbital frontal cortex specifically.

There is a later, reversible version of this procedure called deep brain stimulation that involves placement of an electrode directly in the brain.[20] This approach has been very helpful for Parkinson's disease and for movement disorders, like dystonia. It may also help treat OCD.[21]

DUKE

Nats30006 - I think we've all got a bit of OCD in us. At the moment every Saturday (no idea why it's only Saturday) I close my front door to go out and have to return as I fear that I've left the cooker on. Everything in my home has to be reasonably tidy and I do have to peer into drawers and cupboards on a daily basis just to make sure that everything's ok. I count thing too if I'm bored - college and uni were a nightmare for me as after about 20 mins I'd begin my counting. Don't be afraid to go to see your Dr as s/he can put you in touch with a counsellor who you can discuss this with .... There could be something else that's bothering you subconsciously.

Carrera74

I am a compulsive handwasher. I can't eat anything unless I have scrubbed my hands. It's got that bad that at work if I have to touch anything before I eat my lunch I'll have to wash my hands again I'm convinced I'll get poisioned or sick if I eat anything without clean hands. It is getting worse but when I saw my GP about 12 months or so for another matter and told him about it and his comment to me was 'well at least you have clean hands!'. It's getting that bad that even making a brew I'll wash my hands several times. My oh and kids must think I am mental - I do