Living with OCD

Due to pervasive misconceptions around this serious psychiatric condition, a lot of people suffer with their symptoms for a long time before getting help. It’s also complicated to unpick the mechanisms of the disorder, and we’ll be exploring the ideas at the cutting edge of current research in this programme. But first, to help us understand a bit more about OCD, I’ve been speaking with Patrick Dolan, a third year student at the University of Cambridge. He first started noticing abnormal behaviours when he was 16 years old…

Patrick - Checking doors were locked, checking I hadn't left the hob on, continuously making sure my dog was inside and I hadn't left him outside when I was about to leave the house. It also manifested in ways in my studies, so I had to constantly reread paragraphs because I wasn't sure whether I'd completely understood it. I'd get stuck on certain pieces of work because completing it just didn't feel right. And turning in assessments, they had to be perfect for the teachers.

James - Distortions of useful behaviours. Checking your work, something that would make sense to do, making sure the hob's not on so you don't burn the house down, but how would you describe it to someone who's not familiar how it turns into something more than just a rational thing?

Patrick - Like you say, a lot of the behaviours actually stem from normal things you would do every day. However, the obsession comes when you go back to it multiple times. Even if you see, for example, that the hob is turned off, it doesn't feel right in your head that it is turned off and that's where the compulsions kick in. You might need to turn it off and on, off and on, off and on. You might need to keep revisiting it or in some more severe cases, if it's not treated, you might for example leave the house and get five minutes down the road and then think, did I turn the hob off? And in some cases that might require you to return back, go into the house and check the hob is off. That cycle can go on forever and ever until you actually feel satisfied in yourself.

James - It's, I can imagine, extremely exhausting when people claim to be a little bit OCD, which is a gross misunderstanding of the genuine psychiatric condition experienced by people like you.

Patrick - Exactly. And I think mental health is something that's more talked about nowadays, and we do have the words to speak about it and people are becoming more comfortable speaking about their own feelings. However, for example, if you say that you have depression when you don't, you haven't actually been diagnosed with it, people will call you out and say, 'you can't just say you're depressed because you feel a bit sad. That's not fair on the people that are actually suffering from depression.' But if you get people saying, 'I'm so OCD, I like to colour coordinate my notes, I have to have everything lined up,' they might actually be OCD symptoms, but if you haven't been diagnosed and it's clear you don't have the condition, then it can be upsetting for people that do. I'm not saying people do this maliciously, but I think now as we have these conversations it needs to be something that we stop saying.

James - I think you are definitely right there. As you got older, did your OCD change in any way?

Patrick - The best way to describe it to you is that it shifted from the compulsions more into my head. It almost became more of a mental health issue because there weren't physical symptoms of it anymore. I wasn't tapping or checking. I admit, I think this probably came from a bit of shame. I didn't really want to speak about it when I was younger and I noticed that people noticed I was behaving in certain ways. I think I tried to stop and repress the compulsions as much as possible, but as you'll know, that's just not possible. It kind of went more into my head and it became more of a pure form where it just completely affected my thoughts and I had less compulsions, but it was stronger than ever really.

James - It's just this overwhelming feeling of powerlessness against the thoughts inside your head?

Patrick - Exactly, yeah. It's like my brain is blackmailing itself. It wasn't sure of where it stood in any situation.

James - How have you managed to manage the condition? Whether it be in those earlier years or more recently?

Patrick - To be honest, the best thing I did was to start speaking about it. I didn't know anybody else that had suffered from such a thing. I felt so different to everyone else. I'd heard of depression and anxiety, but I hadn't seen these symptoms in real life. It's only coming to Cambridge actually, when I first got here, that I found a lot of people were very comfortable speaking about the condition. That almost gave me the confidence to be like, okay, I'm not alone. It's from there that, for the first time, I could say stuff out loud, I could admit it to other people, to my friends and my family, without feeling I was different or I was strange. It was only these conversations that actually made me go and get help, go to the NHS and get cognitive behavioural therapy.