Why talk about Pure OCD?

Hopefully, the previous post briefly answered: what is Pure OCD? But why talk about Pure OCD, why is it important?

As I’ve already suggested, Pure OCD can be incredibly difficult for sufferers to talk about, which is the primary step toward finding treatment. I don’t like to see myself as a victim; however, it’s a tragedy that such a severe mental illness is still not in the public consciousness. Hopefully, this blog can be a small step in Pure OCD becoming better understood generally. The little that people generally do know – obsessive cleaning rituals – is often counter productive as (in my case) has almost nothing to do with Pure OCD. This feeling of alienation that Pure OCD brings is truly awful, and I hope this blog could remedy these emotions in some small way.

Why is Pure OCD difficult to talk about?

There are at least two very good reasons why Pure OCD is difficult to talk about. Firstly, sufferers and health “professionals” (at least in my twenty years experience of looking) don’t even know what Pure OCD is. Imagine going to the doctor with a broken arm, but you or the doctor, don’t know bones exist: as though the human skeleton was like a footnote, long forgotten in a dusty textbook the doctor hadn’t seen for forty years and probably never read to begin with. It’s like all you can express is a severe pain in your arm and the inability to lift anything, and all the doctor can do is to look at the swelling, prescribe painkillers and not think twice about the actual cause. In fact, it’s even fundamentally worse than that ridiculous situation, it’s as though the sufferer doesn’t even know there is a word for arm, all they can do is cry and clumsily point to the pain. Then, it’s not like the doctor even helps meet the patient halfway saying: “are you referring to your arm?”. No, they’re just as confused as you, but don’t feel your sense of urgency. In contrast, I hope to write a bit about the brain, particularly the amygdala – the part fundamental to the processing of emotions – in future blog posts, as I found some very rudimentary explanations into the brains processes very helpful in coping with Pure OCD.

As if not even having the language to discuss Pure OCD wasn’t bad enough, there is a second huge barrier to talking about Pure OCD. Shame, guilt, fear. For anyone with Pure OCD, especially when they don’t even know what Pure OCD is, let alone they have it, shame guilt and fear are incredibly difficult to overcome. I’ll be honest, it’s not like these feelings are even unwarranted, in the sense of, the condition could be misconstrued and potentially made worse by poorly trained medical professionals or an ignorant general public. I remember this was a big fear of mine. However, I can’t stress enough, these weighty feelings of shame, guilt and fear are not justified, you do not deserve them, they are themselves a driving force of this mental illness. Once sufferers have summoned the bravery and been fortunate enough to have access to an actual mental health professional, the first thing they should expect is to be genuinely reassured that the previous deluge of shame, guilt and fear are not deserved, not helpful and not shared by them. It does require a great deal of trust on the part of the sufferer, but it can be overcome.

Why is talking about Pure OCD helpful?

Talking about Pure OCD is helpful because acknowledging something has to be the first step on the road to coping with it. In many cases, suffers of Pure OCD are like slaves who don’t even know they’re in chains. My goal is to say: “Bro, you’re in prison, the keys to the door are around the corner!” It sounds obvious, but I didn’t even know I was in prison, someone telling me would have been very helpful! It’s not like just picking up the keys is easy, I’m not smugly grandstanding about how obvious it is, but the processes of self-understanding is essentially a simple one in nature albeit incredibly challenging in practice. I’m not out of the prison yet, I probably never will be. But I’ve gone from a maximum security solitary confinement to an open prison and I’ve bribed the guards.

I plan to write about Pure OCD primarily through the lenses of philosophy, psychology and spirituality. Why? Because I have not found any resources that directly relate these fascinating topics to Pure OCD. I want to be original and also feel these subjects have a lot to offer. I also don’t want to be banal. Most advice I find regarding Pure OCD is quite basic and repetitive. You don’t need me to tell you that eating healthily and exercising more is good for mental health for example. It is, of course true, but I’m not exactly a fitness fanatic and I hoped to write about topics that a.) I’m personally interested in b.) know something about c.) offers value in the sense of it’s not parroted in boring pamphlets you’ll find in a stale GP Surgery.

There will always be a stigma around mental illness and I can understand why: to outsiders it’s scary, easily misunderstood and experts in mental illness still have so much more to understand about the mind, never mind the man-on-the-street! However, I feel that Pure OCD is particularly poorly understood and treated,  primarily due to the two reasons above, which are largely unique to the illness. That’s not to downplay other varieties of mental illness, after all, I hope to go on to write how Pure OCD bleeds over into other categories of mental illness anyway. I’m also very sceptical of the whole classification system of mental illnesses – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – but that’s a story for another post.