Doubt is thought’s despair; despair is personality’s doubt. . .;
Doubt and despair . . .
belong to completely different spheres;
different sides of the soul are set in motion. . .
Despair is an expression of the total personality,
doubt only of thought.
- Søren Kierkegaard

Doubt as a disorder?

For myself and those millions of others who live with the “Doubting Disease”, as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is sometimes called the answer is, yes. For us doubt can be pathological.

There is a need for certainty in OCD. Certainty is, of course, elusive. It is in this not knowing that compulsive ritual is born.

The disorder asks, “What if?”. The question comes unbidden. In answering that question we are lost. We are lost in a labyrinth of increasing anxiety unable to break free. Fear, horrific images, vivid terrifying consequences consume us. “What if?” is the obsession.

If only we could know for sure that these terrors will not come to pass. But we can not know. There is something fundamentally wrong with that process in us. The disorder is unable to tolerate uncertainty. In the absence of certainty we seek relief. We seek anything that will stop this searing anxiety. One whose fears are centered around contamination will begin to wash or decontaminate. Another will check to make sure they have done something or not done something and on it goes. Soon the behavior becomes ritualized. It has to be done a certain way and a certain number of times. It evolves becoming more and more complicated until it takes over the persons life.

OCD afflicts 2%-3% of any given population . It does not discriminate, geographically or ethnically. It is found across the whole spectrum of human culture and population. Many of these millions of sufferers do not know what is wrong with them. They do know that something is wrong. They know that these strange demands are irrational but cannot stop. They do not know that they are not alone.

This page is just by one of those people.

If this page helps anyone, either to find help or just to discover they are not alone, then it’s purpose will have been then defined. I am just attempting to carry the message.

A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again and look with terror at the wall, until one day he begins afresh to beat his head against it; and once again he will faint. And so on endlessly and without hope.

One day he will wake up on the other side of the wall.
- Simone Weil

About Me

Right off the top let me make clear that I am not a professional in the medical, psychiatric or social work fields. I am not a doctor or therapist. I’m just a guy with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder).

I have had OCD for 40 years more or less and was diagnosed (finally) about 10 years ago. Which puts me at being 40 something and lets leave it at that.

That, I suppose, makes me something of an expert at living, or surviving, with OCD. I also know from personal experience a lot about what OCD treatments are and what they are like. I have an intense and up close knowledge of side effects for instance. Believe me, I’ve tried all of the medications, common and uncommon, CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), talk therapy, you name it, everything except surgery, which I have declined.

My OCD is considered refractory, unamenable to treatment-so far. It’s also considered severe to extreme. I usually score in the low 30′s on the YBOCS (Yale Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale) which is a tool used to determine if treatment is working-sort of.

This would be the place where I would put some accomplishments and so forth. And while I have attended college for instance, and done well while there, I have never finished. OCD has conspired in part or in whole to take away most of the opportunities I have had in my life. But that story can be found in my other pages

The long term goal of this site is to put a face to OCD, to make it a personal site. There are many good sites on the Web for OCD that contain great information and resources, but not many that try to convey what it is like from a personal point of view.

Ideally, if someone who knows they have a problem stumbles across this site and, in reading, sees something of themselves or identifies with what they see and then seeks help or even learns that they are not alone and that there is help available – that would be what this site is about.

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind’s throwing?
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825– 95), English biologist.

OCD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
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I know my hands are clean. I know that I have touched nothing dangerous. But… I doubt my perception.

Soon, if I do not wash, a mind numbing, searing anxiety will cripple me. A feeling of stickiness will begin to spread from the point of contamination and I will be lost in a place I do not want to go. So I wash until the feeling is gone, until the anxiety subsides. Then I feel defeated. So I do less and less, my world becomes smaller and smaller and more lonely by the day. You see, you might have touched something and now you are unsafe.

This is OCD.

I have come to look at periods of my life, held together by some common thread, as “seasons”. It was 1960, I was ten, when I experienced my first “season” of OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder).(1).

While I, in looking back, had several discrete seasons of the disorder before 1960, this was the first of the long-lasting and incapacitating events. For the better part of a year, intrusive and horrifying thoughts about death and dying, heaven and hell and eternity filled my every waking moment. Scary enough stuff for a ten year old, but this had an accompanying unremitting anxiety. The only relief I could find was in praying and church and confession. Today, I know this is “scrupulosity”. After about a year, the obsessions(2) stopped as suddenly as they came.

Never did I tell anyone about what was happening to me. This, for me, seems to be part of the process, to suffer in silence.(3) Today, if I keep it silent, it’s because the behaviors and thoughts are, I know, ridiculous and I prefer to avoid embarrassment. It was part of the whole obsession when I was ten. The obsession required me to be silent, except in the confessional.

The decade of the sixties found me experiencing occasional seasons of obsession though mostly not of a religious nature. It also found me engaging in behavior that resulted in or at least started the other disease process in my life, addiction. While I did not realize it at the time, as I was having too much fun, I was self-medicating the strange thinking away.

In 1971, everything changed. I developed, literally overnight, another form of the disorder. I became a “washer.”(4) I became obsessed with fears of contamination and had to wash to relieve the anxiety. I had to wash in a specific way and a certain number of times depending on the “contamination”.

Within a manner of weeks I became crippled. I could touch nothing without triggering the anxiety and the accompanying behavior, washing. There was no safe place. It forced me to drop out of school. My marriage deteriorated rapidly and eventually she left. If that would have happened without the OCD, I do not know, but it certainly contributed.

At this point, I found increased functionality in the use of alcohol. A drug I had previously avoided. In the drinking, I found I could get through the day. It was the only thing that gave me any distance from the insanity that my life had become.

A distance I desperately needed.