There was a time in my life when I was petrified that I already was, or would become, a pedophile.
I also feared being a murderer or incestuous and ruminated on those possibilities, searching for answers – for some sort of confirmation that the thoughts were real or not.
This hellish mental landscape took me captive for years in my early 20s, without a single other soul knowing, and the repetitive intrusive thoughts were so ‘outside of me’ that I questioned whether I was developing schizophrenia.
It never occurred to me that what I was dealing with was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), because I understood OCD to be repetitive physical rituals related to hygiene or organization – the stereotype.
Mental health misconceptions, resulting from a lack of awareness and education, are the reason I went so long without diagnosis and treatment.
I know, if I’d had a simple understanding of ‘intrusive thoughts’, OCD wouldn’t have been able to shame me into the silence it did; I would have reached out for support before those negative neural pathways were so deeply ingrained.
Stuff the algebra – every person walking this earth should know what intrusive thoughts are. We have to live with our thoughts – thousands of them every single day.
We need to be able to identify when our minds are starting to betray us, early on in the piece, and not when it’s out of hand or too late.
Early intervention is key, and dependent upon an individual being able to recognise signs and symptoms.
It was only after I randomly (and fortunately) listened to a mental health podcast, where a narrator shared his lived experience with OCD, that I realized what I was experiencing, booked in with a psychologist, and got my life back.
Sitting in the therapy chair soon after, I got an education on intrusive thoughts and OCD, learning about its many different subtypes that can center around doing harm to others, relationships (often concerning a partner’s fidelity), religion, sexual orientation, to name just a few.
I learned that everyone in the world has intrusive thoughts to some degree, but someone with OCD gives power to those thoughts.
OCD types fixate on them, worry about their significance, become ashamed of them. OCD mostly involves irrational anxieties. For example, ‘what if this violent thought means I’ll kill someone?’
We focused on my compulsions, which were mostly mental – arguing with the thoughts, seeking reassurance, searching for answers.
Of course therein lies one of the most dangerous misconceptions regarding OCD, that compulsions are always physical, external behaviours, when in actuality they can be mental, internal, hidden from the world.
I gained an arsenal of knowledge and weapons to help me combat my OCD, learning how to ‘let the thoughts come and let them go’, drifting past me like the wind, trying not to give them the emotional response that I had been.
It sounds simple but it took a lot of time and work; it didn’t happen overnight but I did slowly get better, and today, I can proudly say that I no longer meet the diagnostic criteria for OCD.
Not to say I no longer experience intrusive thoughts, but rather the disorder doesn’t consume my time, cause a level of distress, or impair my life in the way it once did.
Mental health disorders are treatable, and that’s why unnecessary suffering devastates and frustrates me.
According to the World Health Organization, more than 700,000 people die due to suicide every year. The organization also notes that one of the barriers to effective care is the social stigma associated with mental disorders.
I told only a few people about my OCD diagnosis for this reason and until just recently, most of my family and friends had no idea of what I went through.
I “came out” of the mental health closet in brazen fashion, publishing a tell-all memoir about my OCD experience, leaving most of my loved ones in shock.
It was easier for me to put my experience on the page than to look people in the eye and try to say, “I had thoughts telling me I was a pedophile”.
Hitting publish was traumatizing. It triggered an OCD flare. But it was like a giant band-aid being ripped off. A f**k you to the stigma. Flipping the bird to shame.
Setting my story free so that maybe people will stop trivializing OCD and making jokes about being ‘a bit OCD’ if they like things neat and tidy.
Because generalized mental health posters and slogans aren’t enough. As a society, we need to know what mental health illnesses really look like. And it ain’t pretty. It’s confronting. But the only way out is through.
