F34.I have always been reluctant to accept labels, but today, for a moment, I felt a sense of peace in giving a name to what was happening in my head and in my actions. In Italy, where I live, there has always been little talk about these disorders, and I honestly never knew much about them. I have always been very anxious since I was very young, thinking that I could control the consequences of everything with my actions. My obsessive rigidity led to frequent panic attacks and depression, until I took sertraline, which really improved my life. I knew I had obsessions and very rigid behaviors about the things I did, but no one had ever told me about this disorder. A few months ago, I stopped taking the medication because I thought I was feeling better, but my thoughts and anxieties came back. Today, for the first time, the specialist who has been treating me for more than three years told me about OCD. I would really like to learn more about It and hope that this will help me to manage something that has always seemed impossible to manage. Perhaps I will go back on medication, but today, even just the thought of being able to read about similar experiences makes me feel much less alone.
I've also just been diagnosed (37m) pure-ocd 80mil Prozac, Canada can't say their are many open ears where im from ,Im lucky to have a very supportive family who work in the field of trauma, and mental health it helps ease with the under tone of depression and the spikes in anxiety. They let me know if im perceiving through cognitive distortions and how medications are either working or not tho it's not always easy for loved ones to be objective especially if It upsets them understand how difficult the spirals are effecting me. Im also sure my father had it and I've seen the emotional damage it can have on entire family's if gone undiagnosed, for men over here we struggle to just acknowledge emotions let alone seek help when their's more going let alone mental compulsion,ruminating, Intrusive thoughts, ect I think im one of the lucky one's .not going to lie I felt haunted,broken,trapped from it and I think its given me a little bit of Cptsd ,im just hopeing one day with advancements genetic testing ,we'll be able to pinpoint the epegenetic switches that have been turned on so we can go in with something like crisper technology and deactivate the underlying genetic factors in relation to our mental hauntings
One thing I really don't know is whether this kind of mental disorder is hereditary. There's a lot of backwardness here... when it comes to OCD, the only thing that comes to mind is people who wash their hands 200 times a day or those who won't cross the street until an even-numbered license plate has passed. It's normal that if you don't have these obvious symptoms, you don't have to worry. The whole mental sphere of intrusive thoughts, rumination, but also anxiety and depression itself is taboo. Perhaps something has been changing lately, but psychiatrists, especially older ones, are still not up to date and don't give diagnoses. Even as a child, it was clear that my mind worked differently, and my parents had me undergo many medical tests, but none were psychiatric. Only a child psychologist told my mother that I was probably stressed as the eldest child in a large family and that it would all go away as I grew up. It took me 30 years to get a (perhaps still incomplete) diagnosis. I hope that in the future things will continue to improve, even in this country.