Mental health conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can be incredibly challenging as they can affect both your thoughts and your behaviors. And for some people, OCD can be all-encompassing as it seeps into every aspect of their lives.
Wherever you fall on the scale of OCD, which affects between 1% and 2% of people in the United States, if its influence is strong, it’s very much worth seeking help to minimize OCD’s impact on your life.
While Dr. Diana Ghelber and the team here at Institute for Advanced Psychiatry acknowledge that no two patients follow the same OCD path, we do have enough experience to recognize when people with OCD can benefit from treatment.
And we want to share some of those flags and warning signs here.
At the heart of OCD are intrusive and invasive thoughts that lead to emotional stress. As a classic example, a person with OCD may have a strong fear of germs and obsess about their presence everywhere in the world. Or, some people with OCD dislike asymmetry and when things are out of order.
These thoughts are excessive, and they can dominate your mind, making it difficult to focus on anything else. And no amount of reason or logic can dispel the thoughts or your subsequent emotional distress.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s time to get help so that you can break free from this obsessive thinking.
Another aspect of OCD is the presence of compulsive behaviors — you act out in response to your obsessive thoughts. For example, you need to wash your hands over and over to get rid of germs or you feel compelled to perform certain tasks in set numbers, such as lock your front door three times.
While some extra handwashing and double-checking the front door might not sound all that bad, these compulsive behaviors can be disruptive. They can become enough of a priority that they make you late for work or you might miss an appointment because you had to go back to the house to check the front door again.
So, if how you function on a daily basis is being affected by your OCD, we want you to come see us.
People with OCD often engage in compulsive behaviors to relieve their anxiety. If your behaviors aren’t enough to relieve your anxiety or emotional distress, it means you're stuck in an unhealthy OCD cycle, a cycle that we can help break with the right treatments.
Many of our patients with OCD report that their personal lives are being affected by their OCD. If relationships with family, friends, and/or partners are falling prey to your OCD, we’d prefer you didn’t lose these important connections, which is where treatment can help.
Let’s say that you used to be able to practice deep breathing to relieve your anxiety. Or maybe you’ve been taking medications to control your OCD. If any of these therapies stop working, we want you to come see us straight away so that we can try other treatment avenues.
For example, we’ve had some great success using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) therapy to help break the OCD cycle in our patients.
The bottom line is that if you’re not finding happiness in your world because of OCD, please don’t delay in getting help. To get that ball rolling, please contact our office in Fort Worth, Texas, to schedule an appointment.
