September 18, 2009

• I Am Obsessive

  I just read a post on Healthkicker about OCD, and it inspired me to write this.

  I don’t know how many people I have told about this, and I don’t even know for sure if I have mentioned this on here.  I do not have obsessive-compulsive disorder, at least I haven’t been diagnosed with it, but I do have some of the symptoms of it.

  During one of my hospitalizations for depression, my doctor and I discussed having a Brain SPECT scan done of my brain, in order to help him further diagnose what was wrong with me.  And so, I was taken to the radiology department of the hospital, was given a (harmless) radioactive isotope, and then they laid me down and took 3D pictures of my brain.  It was all nice and colorful from the isotope they gave me, clearly showing what parts of my brain were most active.  I found out I have a very overactive frontal lobe, and I also have a lot of activity on one of my temporal lobes, which causes some social anxiety.

  The frontal lobe is responsible for a lot of higher brain functions, including the evaluation of consequences of current actions and altering behavior to avoid future negative consequences.  This is normally a good thing, because it helps us with short-term and long-term planning, gives us ambition, and in general helps us survive.  However, a person with OCD has a very overactive frontal lobe, causing them to obsess about actions and consequences that others consider small, and they have a hard time prioritizing which behaviors to alter.  The intensity of these thoughts is so great that it compels them to alter their lifestyle in response, because their mind has gotten “stuck” (for lack of a better term) on a few specific behaviors.  I have not been diagnosed with OCD, but my psychiatrist said I have a very active frontal lobe that presents itself similarly to OCD.

  When I first found out about it and the doctor mentioned “similar to OCD,” I was devastated.  For one, I now had a name for my condition, and a label.  This may not mean much to you, but in many ways I now was officially labeled as having a “mental illness.”  Like you, I’ve heard people make OCD jokes all the time, and now that I knew I had something similar I knew I would probably be the butt of many jokes.  But the other thing that really scared me was that the thoughts I had been obsessing about at that time were dealing with depression and thoughts of self-harm, a lot of it connecting to my struggle with religion (another thought I constantly obsessed about).  By telling me that I had this, all I could think about was that these thoughts would never leave me, and I would be plagued with them the rest of my life.  I saw myself twenty years in the future in an asylum, committed there because I could no longer function in everyday life.  Even worse, I saw myself in the future still constantly hating myself and thinking about hurting myself, and possibly even doing it a few times.

  Many people understand what it is like to have a thought stuck in your head, like a song or a joke that you just can’t stop thinking about.  But usually, those go away within a very short time, and even while you’re thinking about them they don’t interfere with your regular activities.  I have had times where I was thinking about something so much and it affected my performance at work, kept me from sleeping, and even directly caused me to become physically ill because I was obsessing so much.  People who don’t have it seem to think that all we need to do is just stop thinking about something and that is the end of it.  They don’t seem to understand why we can’t do this simple task.  But you see, we do want to stop thinking about it, but then we start obsessing about not thinking about it, which is thinking about it.  We want nothing more than to be able to push these thoughts out of our heads and live somewhat “normal” lives, but often we feel powerless to stop it, and even feel trapped inside our own brains at times.  I have even thought about going to extreme measures like getting shock therapy to help me stop thinking about it.  Please don’t think I am judging you for not understanding.  I know that most of the time people who joke about it do not have malicious intent behind their jokes.  Hell, I even poke fun at myself for my own OCD.  I just wanted to help you understand what it is like to be in the mind of an obsessive person.

  Though I do have good news.  It is possible to recover from this obsessiveness, at least partially.  Psychiatrists have developed ways to help people confront and deal with the fear often associated with OCD, and patients have found relief from their symptoms (or at least less severity).  I myself have started to get to the point where I can use mental techniques to calm myself down and get my mind focused on other things, and I have seen quite a relief as a result.  It is still something I deal with on a regular basis, and it is probably something I will have to work at for the rest of my life, but the good news is that it gets easier each time I do it.  If you do have OCD or some similar disorder, please don’t lose hope, thinking that you will be stuck in your own head for the rest of your life.  There are ways to work through it.  You don’t have to suffer for the rest of your life.

  Anyway, those are just my thoughts about the subject.  It is something that I think about a lot (I’m obsessive, after all) and I wanted to get it out there.

  • 11:28 am
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