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Tag: OCD

  • How Those With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Cope With Added Angst Of COVID

    People with OCD face uniquely difficult mental health battles, including trying to distinguish concerns brought on by their conditions from general fears shared by the public about COVID-19.

    Before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the United States, Chris Trondsen felt his life was finally under control. As someone who has battled obsessive-compulsive disorder and other mental health issues since early childhood, it’s been a long journey.

    “I’ve been doing really, really well,” Trondsen said. “I felt like most of it was pretty much — I wouldn’t say ‘cured’ ― but I definitely felt in remission or under control. But this pandemic has been really difficult for me.”

    Trondsen, 38, a Costa Mesa, California, therapist who treats those with obsessive-compulsive and anxiety disorders, has found himself excessively washing his hands once again. He’s experiencing tightness in his chest from anxiety — something he hadn’t felt in so long that it frightened him into getting checked out at an urgent care center. And because he also has body dysmorphic disorder, he said, he’s finding it difficult to ignore his appearance when he’s looking at himself during his many Zoom appointments with clients each day.

    From the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, experts and media have warned of a mounting mental health crisis as people contend with a pandemic that has upended their lives. A recent KFF poll found that about 4 in 10 adults say stress from the coronavirus negatively affected their mental health. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF, the Kaiser Family Foundation.)

    But those with obsessive-compulsive disorder and other serious anxieties face uniquely difficult mental health battles, including trying to distinguish concerns brought on by their conditions from general fears shared by the public about COVID-19. People with OCD have discovered one advantage, though: Those who have undergone successful treatment often have increased abilities to accept the pandemic’s uncertainty.

    Dr. Katharine Phillips, a psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian and professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, said it’s possible that patients who have been in consistent, good treatment for their OCD are well protected against the stress of COVID-19.

    “Whether it’s excessive fears about the virus, excessive fears about possible repercussions to the virus, whether that’s financial effects ― good treatment protects against relapse in these patients,” Phillips said.

    Those with OCD feel compelled to repeatedly perform certain behaviors, such as compulsive cleaning, and they may fixate on routines. OCD can also cause nonstop intrusive thoughts.

    Carli, who asked that her last name be withheld because she feared professional repercussions, can trace her OCD to age 6. The coronavirus pandemic has sent Carli, a 43-year-old from Jersey City, New Jersey, into a spiral. She’s afraid of the elevators in her building, so she doesn’t leave her apartment. And she’s having trouble distinguishing an OCD compulsion from an appropriate reaction to a dangerous pandemic, asking those without OCD how they’ve reacted.

    “The compulsions in my head have definitely gotten worse, but in terms of wearing a mask and cleaning my groceries and going into stores, it’s really hard to gauge what is a normal reaction and what is my OCD,” Carli said. “I try to ask people, Are you doing this? Are you doing that?”

    Elizabeth McIngvale, director of the McLean OCD Institute in Houston, said she has noticed patients struggling to differentiate reactions, as Carli described. Her response is that whereas guidelines such as hand-washing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are generally easily accomplished, OCD compulsions are usually never satisfied.

    McIngvale was diagnosed with OCD when she was 12, with behaviors like taking six- to eight-hour showers and washing her hands for so long they bled. McIngvale receives therapy weekly.

    “It’s just a part of my life and how I maintain my progress,” McIngvale said.

    Lately, she’s found herself consumed with fears of harming or infecting others with the COVID-19 virus — a symptom of her OCD. But, generally, with the tools she’s gained through treatment, she said she’s been handling the pandemic better than some people around her.

    “The pandemic, in general, was a new experience for everybody, but for me, feeling anxiety and feeling uncomfortable wasn’t new,” McIngvale said.

    “OCD patients are resilient,” she added. Treatment is based on “leaning into uncertainty and so we’ve also seen patients who are far along in their treatment during this time be able to manage really well and actually teach others how to live with uncertainty and with anxiety.”

    Wendy Sparrow, 44, an author from Port Orchard, Washington, has OCD, agoraphobia (fear of places or situations that might cause panic) and post-traumatic stress disorder. Sparrow has been in therapy several times but now takes medication and practices mindfulness and meditation.

    At the beginning of the pandemic, she wasn’t fazed because she’s used to sanitizing frequently and she doesn’t mind staying home. Instead, she has felt her symptoms worsening as her home no longer felt like a safe space and her fears of fatal contamination heightened.

    “The world feels germier than normal and anyone who leaves this house is subjected to a barrage of questions when they return,” Sparrow wrote in an email.

    Depending on how long the pandemic lasts, Sparrow said, she may revisit therapy so she can adopt more therapeutic practices. Trondsen, too, is considering therapy again, even though he knows the tools to combat OCD by heart and uses them to help his clients.

    “I definitely am needing therapy,” Trondsen said. “I realized that even if it’s not specifically to relearn tools for the disorders … it’s more so for my mental well-being.”

    Carli has struggled with finding the right treatment for her OCD.

    But a recent change is helping. As the pandemic intensified this spring, many doctors and mental health providers moved to telehealth appointments — and insurers agreed to cover them ― to cut down on the risks of spreading the virus. In April, she started using an app that connects people with OCD to licensed therapists. While skeptical at first, she has appreciated the convenience of teletherapy.

    “I never want to go back to actually being in a therapist’s office,” Carli said. “Therapy is something that’s really uncomfortable for a lot of people, including me. And to be able to be on my own turf makes me feel a little more powerful.”

    Patrick McGrath, a psychologist and head of clinical services at NOCD, the telehealth platform Carli uses, said he’s found that teletherapy with his patients is also beneficial because it allows him to better understand “how their OCD is interfering in their day-to-day life.”

    Trondsen hopes the pandemic will bring increased awareness of OCD and related disorders. Occasionally, he’s felt that his troubles during this pandemic have been dismissed or looped into the general stress everyone is feeling.

    “I think that there needs to be a better understanding of how intense this is for people with OCD,” he said.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • New Series "Pure" Explores Living With OCD, Porn Addiction

    New Series "Pure" Explores Living With OCD, Porn Addiction

    The British series Pure is based on a memoir by Rose Cartwright.

    Pure is a new British TV series that is based on a memoir by Rose Cartwright. The show is about a Scottish woman transplanted in London named Marnie who has obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and she is called a Pure O, or “pure obsessive state,” which is a variation of obsessive compulsive disorder where a person is plagued by intrusive, unwanted thoughts that involve something terrible happening.

    While Marnie doesn’t have the physical rituals of OCD, her character constantly has intrusive thoughts where she sees people naked and having sex everywhere she goes.

    In the show, Marnie explains her condition, “It’s like The Sixth Sense but I don’t see dead people, I see naked ones. Most people move to London to seek their fortune. I’ll settle for some answers.”

    At first, Marnie thinks she’s a sex addict, but then she learns more about her condition when she meets people she hopes can help her.

    The show also follows Charlie, who is addicted to porn. Charlie is played by Joe Cole (Black Mirror, Peaky Blinders), and as he tells Esquire, “I didn’t know about Pure O before I read the script, and then [I] started researching. Very few people seem to know that it exists, and know that it’s a form of OCD. I think it’s great that we’re shedding light on it, because when Rose was young she never had something like this that she could see and understand what she was going through.”

    When asked how he’s seen mental illness being portrayed on TV before, Cole said, “I think these conditions have been previously expressed in comedies and comedy dramas as just, like, hysterical people. And we’re not actually trying to delve in and find out what it really is and try to give a true representation. Not just make a joke about it, but actually explore it in an interesting way and have fun along the way. I can’t really remember a mental health drama when I was growing up, watching teen shows.”

    In playing a character who has an addiction to porn, Cole was asked if he was able to draw any conclusions about the condition from playing his character. “Nothing that I could give you in a neat little sentence,” he said. “I think compassion is key, and at the moment porn addiction is still quite taboo. Someone [with the condition] said they’d rather be addicted to drink—people have far more compassion and empathy [for it]. But they’re real conditions, and people are suffering with them.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Deeper Cleaning: How I Came to Accept My Mother’s Hoarding Disorder

    Deeper Cleaning: How I Came to Accept My Mother’s Hoarding Disorder

    About 50% of all hoarders have blocked access to their fridge, bathtub, toilet and sinks. 78% have houses littered with what could be deemed garbage. My chances of finding a spot to sleep were next to nil.

    For the second time in my life I was saying goodbye to my mother and moving to California, and this could have been a very sentimental moment if it we hadn’t found it so damn funny. With all of my worldly possessions packed up into two great Jenga towers of luggage, Mom and I were doing our best to control the fits of laughter while maneuvering these teetering carts of death toward the terminal. It was the irony that had finally gotten to us. There we were—wrestling with this stuff that could at any second escape our control and come toppling down on top of us—when for the past two months we had been living through a very similar scenario; but one that had been nowhere near as funny.

    And one where my mother’s life had been quite seriously at risk.

    My mom suffers from a clinical hoarding disorder. According to a recent survey by the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), about 5% of our entire planet’s population struggles with this condition typically characterized by the cluttering of a home with personal possessions to an often debilitating degree. A type of anxiety disorder, hoarding is still working its way into the medical books, but thanks to a steady stream of reality TV shows featuring the worst case scenarios of the condition, social awareness of hoarding has reached an all-time high.

    These were the shows that I YouTubed as I tried to better gauge the house that I had walked in on during a surprise visit to Mom’s. Compared to the episodes I watched, my mother and her hoard weren’t ready for primetime just yet—though at the rate she was going, next season was quickly becoming a strong possibility.

    Mom had turned her two bedroom, single level ranch style house of around 1,400 square feet into a storage unit, filling it up with everything from groceries on clearance to thrift store finds too good to let go. As toys, crafts, books, tools, plants, snacks, clothes, shoes, bags and boxes slowly rose to the ceiling, my mother’s home began to look like the bottom of an hourglass, only the sand was her stuff—and once filled up there’d be no easy reset.

    Once her cover was blown, so to speak, she felt the time had come to not only admit she had a serious problem but to finally accept some help dealing with it. And as fate would have it, Mom’s epiphany just happened to coincide with a major shift in my own life. After 15 years of working through my own addiction (drugs and alcohol) I was moving back to California, clean and sober. But, since there was a two-month gap between the lapse of my lease and the end of my teaching year, I just happened to need a place to live.

    So we came up with a plan.

    I would spend those final two months living at Mom’s house, helping her get the clutter under control. At the same time, we would go scouting for some professional help, agreeing that therapy to address the hoarding was in Mom’s best interest. We had a plan: by the time I left Connecticut, Mom would have regained a sturdy foothold on the road to recovery and I could move away, assured that I had done my part in helping.

    And it worked, too. Until it didn’t.

    In that previously mentioned survey by NAMI, about 50% of all hoarders have blocked access to their fridge, bathtub, toilet and sinks. 78% have houses littered with what could be deemed garbage. My chances of finding a spot to sleep were next to nil, though the toilet wasn’t too tough to get to. A garage sale seemed like the perfect solution for opening up some much needed space. Plus, instead of just throwing things out (and to be fair, a lot of Mom’s stuff did have some value) this would give my mother and me an opportunity to really start working together as a team, as opposed to simply strangling one another—which started to have its own appeal once we realized what we were up against.

    Hoarding is a disease based very much on feelings. Boston University Dean and Professor Gail Steketee LCSW, MSW, PhD, who has been studying the condition since the mid-1990’s concluded that “Hoarding may induce feelings of safety and security and may reinforce identity.”

    In other words, Mom’s things helped her feel safe.

    Her stuff was in many ways who she was.

    So emotions began to run high as we debated on what in the house could be sold. At first we were able to work for just a few hours before Mom had to quit, visibly shaken, promising better endurance for the next attempt. Sometimes a span of days would pass where no progress was made at all. Because my mother had the final say on every item’s fate, during these times of indecision there was little more for me to do than just sort through the piles. This part of the process was most challenging for me.

    Finding myself truly face to face with my mother’s disorder, I often spiraled into great bouts of anger and deep depression. Getting lost in the work for hours, I would start dissecting a section of the hoard, piece by frustrating piece, trying to make sense of it. It was during these times that I began to realize my mother was in the grips of a very serious and complex mental illness.

    Hoarding has been listed as a symptom of OCD for years. As defined by the Mayo Clinic, people who have obsessive compulsive disorder experience unwanted thoughts that incline them to perform an action repetitively—usually outside of their control—in hopes of alleviating stress, when in actuality the behavior is only compounding the discomfort.

    Did this explain the bags upon bags of clearance items and price-reduced canned goods? The gathered pile of expired and stale holiday candy? The drawers of zip ties, rubber bands and Tupperware lids. That infuriating metropolis of 7 Eleven cups always collapsing off the microwave. The balls of yarn, rolls of fabric, reams of paper, baskets of shoes. Bed sheets, power cords, energy drinks, sun catchers. Nesting shelves, cleaning fluids, shampoos and conditioners. Paper plates, napkins, condiments—bags of them. If I was disturbed while sorting them, I had to imagine what it must’ve felt like to always need more of them.

    But what I really needed was to seek out that professional help Mom had agreed to from the beginning. In addition to the increasingly alarming nature of the collected stuff, according to a report by Compulsive-Hoarding.com, “A hoarder’s problem will not be solved by someone else throwing away or organizing their possessions.”

    Another invaluable online resource, HoardingCleanup.Com, offered an impressive roster of psychiatrists and psychologists dealing specifically with the disorder. Fortunately, we found a local doctor with whom Mom felt comfortable with right off the bat.

    Then, suddenly, positive results were coming in from every front.

    Once the garage sales got started, they quickly gained momentum and we were setting up the driveway with Mom’s wares every Friday through Sunday. So by the time my departure date rolled around we had become old pros—and one hell of a team. There was nothing at the airport but sincere gratitude and a shared sense of accomplishment. We had done it! We’d beaten the monkey off of Mom’s back, shoved it in a box and sold it in front of the house for a dollar.

    No, fifty cents!

    Seventy-five!

    Okay, seventy-five, sold!

    Over the following months, as I worked on getting my own home together, I would check in with Mom to see how things were coming along. She continued with the garage sales until the weather no longer agreed. The therapy continued unabated. Her psychiatrist was big on baby steps, discouraging Mom from taking on too much at once. Instead, the piles were shrinking through consistency and perseverance, my mother showing him photos from week to week. Also, my father was visiting the house regularly so he was able to give me a report every now and again. 

    According to an article in Psychology Today, “willful ignorance” occurs when a person knows the truth, or at least fears it, but chooses to ignore it altogether. Turning a blind eye was an especially easy behavior for me to indulge in from 3,000 miles away, so I was flabbergasted when one night my father called and told me that Mom’s house had reverted to its previous state of congested disarray and that her hoarding was back with a vengeance.

    What an awful moment of deja vu. Were we really right back to where we had started, just like that?

    Though my 12-step meetings and sponsor helped calmed me down with some much needed perspective, for the first time in recovery I found myself resenting the solution that was being offered—which was, as always, acceptance. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” blah blah blah.

    No.

    I refused to accept it. I would not sit idly by while my mother sat on the one spot she had left on her sofa, watching a TV she had to crane her neck around piles of junk to see—the same piles that were slowly but surely burying her alive. Somebody had to take charge of this mess. Who was responsible? I blamed her, her doctor, my father, myself. I blamed thrift stores, dollar stores, America, God.

    What went wrong? How could Mom go back to hoarding after such encouraging progress? This had been the strongest attempt at complete recovery from her disorder so far.

    There was a night I called Mom up ranting and raving, horrendously demanding to know exactly what was the problem—and her timid response to me, plain and simple was:

    “It’s hard.”

    That was a mouthful. And it’s actually the one thing all the research and professionals in the field agree on. Recovery from hoarding is incredibly difficult. The statistics tell us it’s downright unlikely. A study conducted by the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry on patients with various forms of OCD, including hoarding, found that after five years only 9.5% of hoarders achieved and maintained full recovery from their condition.

    But then this begs the bigger issue—and it’s where my eyes opened.

    When we’re looking at recovery from hoarding, are we also looking at recovery from OCD? This experience showed me that my mother isn’t just struggling against shopping and filling her house up with stuff—but she’s battling an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Unlike my substance abuse where complete abstinence from drugs and alcohol is the solution (though of course there’s lots more to it), my mother is dealing with a behavioral disorder. And when it comes to long lasting recovery, therapy continues to be the key.

    Compulsive-Hoarding.com told me that if a hoarder’s space is just cleaned out, “The clinical compulsive hoarder will simply re-hoard even faster and fill up their home again, often within a few months.” However, that NAMI survey showed that as much as 70% of hoarders responded positively to cognitive therapy.

    So Mom is on the right track.

    It’s just that the odds are not in her favor.

    But so far she’s beaten a lot of those odds, hasn’t she? My mother’s already admitted to having a problem when NAMI reports that only about 15% of all hoarders do so. And she’s in therapy where her recovery has the highest likelihood of success. How many attempts will it take before Mom finds long term recovery? Nobody knows.

    All I know is that recovery from hoarding seems to be an inside job and that’s the stuff that really needs to be worked through. Once I accepted that about my mother and her hoarding condition I knew the best thing to do was leave that work to her.

    Find info about hoarding here:

    https://namimass.org/hoarding-and-ocd-stats-characteristics-causes-treatment-and-resources

    View the original article at thefix.com