OCD Awareness Week Day 7 - A Final Thought

So, OCD Awareness Week 2013 is drawing to a close, and I have to admit that, although I've done a lot to try and raise awareness throughout this week, there is still a part of me that thinks awareness weeks like this one aren't such a great idea. Why? Because they give people the idea that they can be "aware" for the duration of seven days and then go back to their everyday lives as if nothing ever happened. It unwittingly makes people believe that everything goes back to being fine and dandy at the end of the week, when in reality it doesn't. OCD doesn't go away just because we reach October 21st. I won't be magically cured of my illness at midnight tonight, and neither will any of the other 700,000+ people in the UK alone who live with OCD. It does not cease to exist just because the general public ceases to acknowledge it. So while I support OCD Awareness Week wholeheartedly, I also support OCD awareness for the rest of the year, when it is just as important.

That being said, my life does not solely revolve around my OCD. It controls a lot of what I do, but there are a lot of things in my life that this disorder can't touch. It can never take away the value I put on my family, or change any of my likes and dislikes. It is barely affecting me at all right now, as I sit on my bedroom floor typing this post while listening to Evanescence on iTunes. So yes, it is a serious illness that severely impacts my life and the lives of many other people, but it isn't everything. That's why I think mental health awareness is such an important thing; I feel that people need to see the side of it that I see every day. I want people to know that, even though I have this awful disorder, I also have likes and dislikes, hopes and dreams, one sister, a cat, a dog and ten (soon to be twelve) cousins. I live without the ability to control my irrational thoughts, but I also live in an English suburb with my parents and my little sister, just like my friends, my neighbours and the majority of the people at my school. I am mentally ill, but I am not mental, and neither is anyone else like me.

OCD Awareness Week Day 6 - Sources of Support

There are loads of places online and beyond that people with OCD can go to for support. I've listed a few here - just click on the pictures to visit their websites.

Minds Like Ours is a non profit organisation that supports those with mental health problems and raises awareness of mental health in general. I talk about them a lot, mainly because of their awesome forum.

OCD Action and OCD-UK are the UK's two charities that support people with OCD. They both do some really awesome work. OCD Action also has a website specifically for young people (if you look hard enough, you can find the article that I wrote for them recently), which you can find via their main website.

The Samaritans and Childline are both charities set up to help people in times of crisis or emotional distress. The only real difference is that ChildLine is specifically for people under the age of 18 (hence the name).

Mind is arguably the UK's biggest and most well known mental health charity. Their website has some great information about different mental health disorders, and I'm pretty sure they have a helpline as well.

Do you like my special "Click Here" buttons? I discovered picture effects presets on Microsoft PowerPoint today and it felt like Christmas.

OCD Awareness Week Day 5 - OCD and The Media

The media coverage for this year's OCD Awareness Week has been great (links to most of the best bits can be found via OCD-UK's website or twitter page), and the BBC documentary Extreme OCD Camp, which aired earlier this year, was absolutely amazing, but there have been some examples of OCD related media coverage that have not been so beneficial.

An obvious example of this is Channel 4's extremely damaging series Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, which involves sending people who in most cases probably don't even know what OCD stands for into messy houses to clean them up. Not only is this a drastic misrepresentation of OCD, it is encouraging people to laugh at it and to believe that it really is just about people who enjoy being in a tidy environment.

Luckily, there are other people out there who agree with me, such as Claire Watkinson, who made this fantastic video response to the show:

As she mentioned, Claire is currently making her own film about OCD (you can find out more using the links at the end of the video), which I hope will contribute to the positive side of OCD awareness and help show people what OCD really is, as opposed to what horrendous shows like Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners tell you it is.

Of course, the media isn't all about what goes on in TV, so before I move on to my next post, I thought I'd share an awesome song that I found, which is Everything is Alright by Motion City Soundtrack:

I don't own either of the videos in this post, so no copyright infringement intended and all that.

OCD Awareness Week Day 4 - OCD and School

I'm afraid I haven't really felt up to posting in the last few days, but now I've finally got the energy I intend to catch up on the posts I've missed.

So, the topic I picked for day four of OCD Awareness Week was OCD and school.

For anyone whose OCD includes a fear of contamination, school is obviously going to be a challenge, but add that to being unable to have your back to anyone and being surrounded by hundreds of misinformed and in many cases totally uninformed people and it becomes a nightmare. I do have a few good friends at my school, but on the whole it's not a place I enjoy going to.

Possibly the hardest thing about the school routine is getting enough sleep. Secondary schools are notorious for starting their days much earlier than is beneficial for the typical teenager, and put that on top of an exhausting mental health problem and you're totally screwed if you're still awake past 11pm, which I always am. Why? Well, the answer is something of a vicious cycle, so I decided to make it into a diagram:

However, as with everything, there is a positive side. As I mentioned before, there are hundreds of students at my school - more than a thousand, in fact. That's a lot of people who can be made aware of OCD. Obviously I'm not going to be able to change the minds of 1000 people on my own, but there are ways of getting the message out there, such as suggesting assemblies and charity events, or making videos, such as this one, which I showed to my form just before World Mental Health Day this year:

Or this one, which I made for Minds Like Ours (although unfortunately it never got uploaded due to technical difficulties).

OCD Awareness Week Day 3 - Myths and Facts About OCD

Having created a list of topics to cover over the course of this week, I have decided that my discussion point for day three of OCD Awareness Week will be myths and facts about OCD. And there are loads! So many, in fact, that I decided to make a Bob and Steve episode addressing some of them, which you can see below:

So besides those, what other myths exist about OCD? Well, these were the ones that I came up with; let me know if you think of any more:

Myth #1 ~ OCD is Attention Seeking.
This is definitely one of my top three most hated myths about OCD. I can almost tolerate people comparing themselves to those with the disorder (I actually can't, but that's beside the point. I just have to smile and politely correct them.), and I can even put up with people laughing at my compulsions (although I really shouldn't have to, just saying), but attention seeking!?  Do you honestly think I do all of this for attention!?!? On the contrary, the thoughts and behaviours that dominate my life so much because of my OCD are pretty much the sole reason why I dread social situations, gravitate to the back of every crowd and spend many hours each day alone in my bedroom. If anything, attention is what I want to avoid, not generate. So yeah, on to the next myth:

Myth #2 ~ Having OCD Means Acting Like Monica From Friends.
On the whole, I think that TV programmes are responsible for a large number of these myths, and Friends is no exception, despite being one of my favourite shows (although it can't top Downton Abbey). While it never actually says that Monica has OCD, or even any mental disorder, her overly perfectionistic behaviour seems to be the image that most people think of when they hear the term. A far better example from the same programme would be the guy from the museum whose one line in the entire series was "I have to turn the light switch on and off seventeen times before I leave a room or my family will die!", although I was very annoyed at the fact they played the laughter track immediately afterwards. Okay, so I'll admit that some of Monica's behaviours are consistent with certain elements of OCD, but the key thing that sets her apart from an OCD sufferer is the enjoyment that she gets from activities such as cleaning. Let me make it clear now that compulsions that are part of OCD are never enjoyable. In fact, if you found your compulsive rituals fun then you wouldn't even qualify for a diagnosis of OCD in the first place. So there.

Myth #3 ~ There is Only One Type of OCD.
Contrary to popular belief - or, perhaps, popular ignorance - there are in fact several different categories of OCD, although many people fall into more than one category, and you are unlikely to ever find a professional who classifies these groupings as separate disorders. So why have a classification system in the first place? Well, it has been noticed by mental health professionals over the years (or so I assume) that the obsessive thoughts experienced by OCD sufferers usually come under a specific category, and that obsessions rarely stray outside these specific guidelines (although I'm not sure that's the right word to use). However, as I said, many people with OCD fall into several categories, and their obsessions can gradually change over time. My own OCD fits mainly into two different areas, although  there are some milder symptoms that come under others.

Funny, perhaps, but not OCD.
Photo courtesy of Google Images (in other words, don't blame me for the font).

Myth #4 ~ You Could Have OCD If You Only Spend 5 Minutes On Compulsions.
One thing that I find surprises people when I talk to them about OCD is that, in order to qualify for a diagnosis, obsessions and compulsions must take up at least one hour a day of a sufferer's time. However, this does not mean to say that everyone diagnosed with OCD spends this amount of time on rituals every day. For example, a person may have the obsession that they might poison their family if they buy the wrong type of food at the supermarket. They may only do two grocery shops every week, but have to spend four hours on each one, which adds up to the equivalent of more than an hour every day. Add that to the time they undoubtedly spend avoiding supermarkets and grocery shops, and you find a pretty severe case of OCD, despite the fact that they may be able to go days at a time with no symptoms at all.

OCD Awareness Week Day 2 - My Experience

My first post topic for OCD Awareness Week is the obvious choice of writing about my own experiences with the disorder. When I was diagnosed with OCD not so long ago, I found myself looking back at my life and realising that I first experienced symptoms of it around eleven years ago - when I was three years old. However, these symptoms only became severe enough to have a significant impact on my life about 4 or 5 years ago, when I was coming to the end of primary school. This was when I first began to fear that people could see or hear what I was thinking, even though I knew it was impossible, and I became terrified of sitting or standing with my back to people - a pretty inconvenient fear to have when your teacher decided on a new seating plan at random every Monday morning.

Some people reading this may wonder why I didn't just ask to move seats, which is, after all, something I find myself doing now on a regular basis. I almost certainly would have asked had I known how to, but the problem I had at the time was that I had no idea that what I was experiencing was a mental health disorder. In fact, it took me two and a half years from the day I first started experiencing these fears to realise that they were not something I would grow out of, and a further two years after that to find out the name of my condition.

Unlike most people, I had known about OCD for years before I was diagnosed with it, and, in fact, years before I fully developed it. But my first encounter with the disorder was not from a news feature or documentary, or even from my grandma, who I now recognise as the person I inherited the illness from in the first place. Nope, the first place I ever heard about obsessive-compulsive disorder was actually a fiction book about a group of pre teen students at the Royal Ballet School. Ironic, huh? But the funny thing was that, even at the age of eight or nine, I still related the symptoms of OCD to myself (although having said that, it seems to be something that everyone does these days). Even now, I remember reading the line "One of my friends had OCD. Her thing was washing her hands, until they were red and raw." and immediately thinking I do that, too. And it was true, I did spend a lot of time washing my hands for a child my age, and the eczema I already had on my hands was far worse for it.

And so, even though it turned out that the character in the book actually had obsessive compulsive personality disorder rather than OCD, the knowledge that it existed still stuck in the back of my mind. Despite this, though, I still didn't attribute most of my symptoms to OCD. In fact, it wasn't until a few weeks before I was diagnosed that I finally figured out what was going on with my head. I mean, I knew that I was going through two bottles of hand sanitizer a week and that I couldn't even leave the house, go into the bathroom, play a musical instrument or even type without my brain being overcome with the need to perform some elaborate ritual, but for some reason it just didn't click until someone linked me to the online M3 test and I scored a disheartening 55, with a 2 in three chance that I had depression and a 90% chance that I was suffering from some kind of anxiety disorder. This, of course, sent me straight to Google, where I eventually found the words that had been on the tip of my tongue for so long. From there, I went to my GP, and I am now counting down to my first appointment with CAMHS (the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service) on the 25th.

Now? Well, I would love to be able to say that I had improved since my diagnosis, but I haven't. I am still in exactly the same place that I described in the above paragraph, and as far as I'm aware my M3 score is pretty much the same. But that doesn't mean that nothing's changed. Once I had a name for my disorder and a proper explanation of what it was, I joined a mental health forum called Minds Like Ours and I am now one of their forum ambassadors and video editors, which is pretty fun. It's also given me the ability to raise awareness (hence this series of blog posts), the knowledge that I am not alone and the chance to get the help I need to recover (once I get over my fear of letting go of my rituals, which could take time).

OCD Awareness Week Day 1

I'm aiming to write a post every day this week for OCD Awareness Week! Unfortunately I'm a little short on time today, but starting from tomorrow I'll pick a different related topic every day and write about it.

World Mental Health Day 2013 *Possible Trigger Warning*

So, as you probably figure out from the title, today is World Mental Health Day, and, as a person who lives with a mental health disorder, I thought it would be a good idea to post about it.

World Mental Health Day is undoubtedly the biggest campaigning day of the year for many mental health organisations and charities, who take advantage of the special occasion to launch new initiatives to break down the mental health stigma (which could arguably be capitalised). I know I spent many hours creating an
awareness video for Minds Like Ours (although this will probably not be uploaded until tomorrow due to technical difficulties) in the form of a song that I wrote with my cousin Mary.

And since it is World Mental Health Day and we are aiming to share our stories free of judgement, I suppose I should admit that I really haven't had a good day today. If you've read my first post, you'll know that I suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and let me tell you, when you have this particular illness, the price for forgetting a specific ritual is pretty horrendous. This time, the realisation that I had forgotten a complex routine the day before triggered an even more complex set of intrusive thoughts that literally compelled me to tear at my skin with my fingernails constantly for six hours straight. So now you see why this post has a trigger warning. By the time I got home from school I was more tired than I have ever been in my life, and I still have several pieces of homework, many of them due tomorrow, that I haven't even started yet. Which means that I should probably go and do that...

The "Plus Size" Phenomenon - What Is The World Coming To?

The recent "plus size" movement came to my attention a little while ago when I saw an advert for the clothing company Simply Be - which describes itself as being "exclusively sizes 14 - 32" - and found myself getting very angry. The problem was not that they were making clothes in bigger sizes, but that they quite clearly thought that they were promoting equality and acceptance by segregating the people who wear these larger clothes. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that many women are grateful that these sizes are not being ignored, but I can also be sure that there are many more - especially young girls - who will see the advert and immediately assume that they must be "fat" because there are companies that have to make clothes specifically for their size. I find it to be very similar to the times when the American government thought they were doing the right thing by setting up schools exclusively for black children, or allowing them to take the seats right at the back of the buses.

I also find the idea of "plus size models" to be absolutely abhorrent, particularly when many of these women would not be considered even remotely plus size in another profession. Why can't all models just be models regardless of their size? In fact, why can't all people just be people regardless of their size, shape, colour, personality, intelligence, gender, background, class, social status, abilities or lack thereof? I'm not saying that services for the disabled should be disbanded or that extra help shouldn't be given to those who need it, I'm simply stating that you're not doing people any favours by disguising discrimination as acceptance.

One of the media's so called "plus size" models.