Dr Patrick, can transcranial magnetic stimulation help recreate new learning pathways for ocd suffers and synergise treatment effectiveness hand-in-hand with ERP? Medication does not help with this as far as we know. Thank you so much in advance for your feedback!
WOW,I just realized something the problem isn't that I have the thought...the problem is it causes me enough anxiety to the point that I have to act on it to make it go away instead of just letting it pass on it's own even tho it causes me anxiety...that is soooo hard to do.
I’m currently associating every single action of mine (not wanting it to be a conpulsion) feeling like it is a compulsive, because I’m getting so worse. I don’t know what’s happening and feel like I’m spiralling into a hole of guilt. Im feeling like my mind has completely stopped working at the moment, and I don’t know what is going on. Like stuck in a black hole.
Update: interesting, a day before I was fearing the exact thing: I didn’t want to feel like im in a black hole. I guess OCD makes worst fears come true to see us going crazy.
Thank you Howie. I started with early early, but small irritants and not thinking much about it at age 9. My OCD grew and became a daily occurrence (all day long) at age 35. I thought until I was the age of 55 that I was the only one and did not know of OCD. It gave me hope and was amazed that they are others with this, however the feeling and all that goes with OCD is still with me today at 65.,I spoke with NOCD for several months st twice a week. Help so very much, I stopped only because my therapist needed to take time away from her position there. It’s been 12 months since my last visit and now going back to NOCD very soon. Those with OCD, Please give NOCD a call and Award as it may be at first talking of your thoughts and behavior can decrease if not almost dissolve, and most importantly, NOCD will deliver. Hope it helps!
Me trying to choose which hot dog to eat first because i feel bad for the other one and just want things to be equal for them. 😌 Lol it took me 15 minutes of just staring analysing the hot dogs before choosing to eat one.
Lol, as a kid, someone of my school told me a horror story that stuck with me for years and years. So to reassure myself, I would do a special routine right before bed and I thought : If I do this, than im protected for atleast 1000 years and I would do it every night to be very sure 😝. For the record i started the routine around 7 years old and stuck with it until i begin high school 🙌 Like I would roll over in my bed a certain amount of times, I would only sleep on one specific side and the most cool one lol, I gave my each my parents exactly a specific number of hugs right before they leave. I also remember planning on how to escape my room if someone were to 💀 me and my family and I would imagine each and every way. 😌
100% it’s very disappointing and depressing not being able to find affordable mental health services. Private pay is extremely expensive and others don’t take a certain insurance. It’s disheartening for parents who are desperate to find help for their child and if it’s not one thing, it’s another. I’m grateful for the internet accessibility and for the IOCDF and all podcasts available, but in the end we need more affordable mental health services so that more people have an opportunity to live a healthier life full of possibilities. Also, thank you so much for sharing your experience and being so open about your struggles! Thank you NOCD for also providing us with podcasts and helpful articles.
I recognise that my son has ocd/scrupulosity. He refuses to look into his mental health illness. I understand the treatment is erp with therapy but, even though I've found a counsellor he refuses to go.
Same is the reason I started my journey with NOCD. Thank you so much for your advocacy! You helped me realize I wasn’t crazy or alone and that I wasn’t something broken that could never be fixed. On the road to feeling better, thank you ❤️
When commenting above, I forgot to make my actual point. A significant and tragic dimension of life for people suffering with OCD is related to a unique sort of loneliness. This relates to the frequent failure of (often very well-meaning) friends, family and community to appraise with accuracy the internal nature of their friend’s emotional response to the content of their obsessive thinking or imagery. Are the thoughts making her friend terrified? Is the suffering friend seething with rage? Or is he feeling hopeless and quite forlorn? For example, if it is a contamination obsession, the concerned friend may have been made aware of the likely content from previous discussions; however, at the same time this particular concerned friend may have no idea which specific emotions their friend with OCD may be experiencing during this, the current moment of having the inescapable thoughts/imagery. The friend also has no way to hazard an accurate guess regarding the severity of this episode, which they themselves are witnessing ; does it seem like their friend’s episode is mild? or, is it moderate? or, is it some sort of severe? Should they be calling for help from a professional ? These are of course, completely innocent difficulties, and in career as a clinical psychologist, the strongest (and often the first) emotional response that my patients would tell me about (at the very start of the very next appointment after such an event) a was guilt; guilt for “making” their friend feel uncomfortable, or concerned, or scared, or whatever they perceived their friend to have felt in response to having witnessed the patient’s obsessive, thinking or compulsive behavior symptoms. So very often, the next emotional symptom set of my patients (continuing to resolve around the friend/witness) was comprised of the myriad, very real worries which my patients felt and maintained about emotional damage done to their friend, or to the friendship; they felt worry or embarrassment or an ongoing distress about their friend and about perhaps the friend still worrying about the incident when there there was certainly no need. A quick second place was self loathing and hatred about having OCD with all other imaginable, emotional responses fitting in there somewhere of course with any number of 10 of people that I knew over time felt emotions such as embarrassed, and more often guilty or sorry for their friend or somehow responsible for making their friend have uncomfortable feelings in a way that was not fair because ‘how could the friend be expected to understand and cope with my symptoms when they’ve never heard of OCD in real life before?’
As a retired clinical psychologist who worked with hundreds of patients living w OCD, I find this comment to be quite reminiscent of a common or representative statement made by patients struggling with OCD.
When Howie said "I was so effing busy" with the mental labor of OCD, wow can I relate to that. I grew up differently because of how much time I spent in my mind, battling the constant intrusive thoughts.
Your videos have encouraged me to see out training in OCD and seek out opportunities to do this work, where a lot of my fellow provisional psychs run the other way ... thank you so much for sharing your knowledge
