DIRT provides hope for OCD hand washers

16 June 2008

A new treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) pioneered at the University of Sydney is having great success by targeting the beliefs behind the obsessive behaviour rather than the behaviour itself.

Now this is interesting. The OCD I live with has, so far, proven to be uh, treatment resistant. So I am always looking for new forms of treatment. And this sounds promising. Besides you have to love the acronym. DIRT (Danger Ideation Reduction Therapy). A bit more info on it can be found here. http://www.commonlanguagepsychotherapy.org/index.php?id=54

I function in society, run a business, but feel pain and anguish most
of the time. I won’t even try to go through the evolution of my OCD,
as I have had probably every conceivable configuration and iteration
of the disease, since age 13. Medicine and cognitive therapy have
provided occasional relief, but it cycles in and out, affixing itself
to my most difficult times in life, as my constant companion. It
knows how to maneuver in such a way as to attach itself, as a leach
attaches to the skin on your body and sucks your blood. Instead it
attaches to and sucks your brain. It sucks out the rationality and
intelligence of reason and composure. It works its way into your
deepest desires and potential triumphs, and preys upon your fears so
as to overcome and counteract the joys that you may have. That is
the goal of this insidious disease, and it can succeed if allowed to
flourish on its own. OCD is a villain, a rapist, a murderer, a
molester, a monster of the worst kind. It selects innocent people
and distorts their sense of intellectual well-being, causing doubt
and uncertainty to pervade one’s mind, until there is nothing more
than doubt and pain. It competes with good thoughts and normal
feelings to sabotage one’s intellect and sense of being alive; it is
a fierce enemy.

I know you well, OCD. I feel your constant efforts to create havoc
with my mind. As a youth, you played with my immature brain and
attempted to destroy it, just as I was trying to create a sense of
self-value. In my most formative stages, you attacked. As an adult,
you convinced me that I was dying and didn’t have a basis to be
comfortable with each day of my life. You eroded my sense of self,
my enjoyment of life. You deprecated and depreciated the good things
that I had, by forcing a behavioral pattern of fear and defeat. There
were not even drugs or therapy for OCD for the first twenty years of
my disease, so I was left to work through it on my own, too
embarrassed to tell anyone in the world what my mind was doing to me,
all the while attempting to fight this enemy by myself.

As a mature male, I fear everything, I distort the reality of what I
have, I find faults and constant defects in myself and those near and
dear to me, and I obsess about all of these things constantly.
After ruining my marriage, now in separation, I fear having
contracted HIV from heterosexual safe sex partners, and even from
kissing women, attractive, healthy women. The fears are overwhelming.
Thanks OCD for so cleverly working your way into every crevasse of my
life, so as to make it as unbearable, even the parts that are supposed
to be good. And the sad part is that my life could be pretty good,
were I to lose this miserable partner - my OCD companion.

I will continue to fight, saddened by the length of time that this
killer has engaged me. I will attempt to be strong and beat this
thing, and I will not give up. Even on the worst of mornings when I
do not want to get out of bed, and when I want to check myself into
a hospital, I will endure the agony and I will survive; no I will
conquer, for the alternative is to allow this miserable disease to
have triumphed over me, to gloat and wallow in its defeat of good and
well-meaning people. None of us should let that happen. Fight for
your life!

POSSESSED on Vimeo
‘POSSESSED’ enters the complicated worlds of four hoarders; people whose lives are dominated by their relationship to possessions.

While on the subject of hoarding here is another article on it.

Submerged in stuff, hoarders keep collecting - Mental health- msnbc.com

“But thanks to new research, the cluttered, confusing world of the compulsive hoarder may finally be starting to sort itself out.”

“Our study results,” Dr. Saito told Reuters Health, “support the widely held view that the orbital prefrontal region is involved in the pathophysiology of OCD. It is important that the results also indicate that the OFC (orbitofrontal circuit) influences symptom severity in patients with OCD.”

More evidence that it really is, “all in our head(s)”.

When Anxiety Is at the Table - New York Times
“Sometimes the trouble is the element of public theater in the dining room, meaning we have to indulge in our often-embarrassing rituals under the eyes of so many strangers while trying not to get caught. Or it might be worrying about the safety of the food and the people who serve it.”

That quote above explains just one of the many reasons OCD is so exhausting.

winnipegsun.com - Manitoba - Attached stigma is worse than the disorder itself

It’s unfortunate that OCD sufferers are often stereotyped as being delusional, cat-collecting and unproductive, or seen as humorously crazy.

This article talks about that stigma.

Then there was, of course, “If I don’t get out of the bathroom within five seconds, my mother will die”, and all that kind of rubbish. The biggest, most destructive and enduring form for me though has been obsessions that my partners have been unfaithful, and seizing upon any tiny little scrap of “evidence” possible to back up these thoughts. “Evidence” can be absolutely anything, a look or something said, or objects I see that will somehow trigger off a bizarre and labyrinthine chain of thought. Any such piece of “evidence” that comes my way will be processed and re-processed maybe fifty times, and looked at from every possible angle, and combined with any other existing pieces of “evidence” before being placed carefully into a type of mental archive to retrieve again at a later date. I have had a couple of ex-boyfriends who I pretty much squeezed information out of, trying to dispel my obsessions, but anything I heard that didn’t quite fit into my schema or the stories I had fabricated in my mind just made the obsessions worse.

About 4 months ago now, these thoughts suddenly really grabbed hold of me again in a relationship with a new partner, and started to manifest themselves every day and in all areas of my life. I first thought they had been triggered by stress from work, but I know it is not just that. I try and let the stuff out by keeping a diary, which I now write in very often, where I just let everything out that comes into my head. Shame the entire diary is pretty much just devoted to my OCD torment now, I don’t really list details of nice things that I do. To me my diary is like a friend, a confidante who I can tell anything without fear of judgment and let my thoughts out so that they can stop ricocheting inside my head. The thoughts must appear so bizarre and irrational to other people, apart from fellow OCD sufferers I guess, but that’s it – we are not rational, no matter how hard we try – our brains are hard-wired to look for any trace of doubt or “evidence”, as I see it, that something is amiss in a situation and to then rehash and rehash this piece of information and combine it with other pieces of information and search for any inconsistencies that exist. There are no absolute answers though, and no truth can never come from this process, and that’s what is hard to accept.

As a result, I am not afraid to fall in love, but there is always a barrier there as my self-defense mechanism, it’s like I am preparing myself for the worst and for being hurt, I even rehearse phrases and scenarios in my head so if someone hurt me, I know what I would say and how I would react. I am trying to get better, I am trying not to “check” things and to look for “evidence” but it is hard. I think I used to be worse though, I would go through my ex-boyfriends’ rooms actually opening drawers and looking for anything that would show they were in a relationship with someone else. If I found an old letter or photograph or something, it was a sickening feeling but in a creepy way almost also a feeling of triumph, in the sense of “Aha! I knew it!” And I think that was the OCD feeling like it had been proven right. It is crazy because the things I store in my head are totally inconsequential to most people, but to me they are everything, I wish I could just wipe the slate clean. I am not like this constantly, but I would say I get a couple of “pangs” and one pretty big attack at least once a day most days, where the thoughts can be whirling around for anything from half an hour to most of the night, depending on the situation and environment. In my current relationship, things started off really rosy and perfect, but then the horrible OCD reared its head a few months back and then I got mega insecure and pretty much had a breakdown as a result, I just could not stand to be in social situations any more. It’s weird, now when I am out somewhere in the pub, on the phone or sitting in the kitchen at home I can have a conversation but my mind is somewhere else completely, so I can say the right thing almost on autopilot while my head is totally full of confusing, repetitive and destructive thoughts. I can still function fairly normally on the surface, even though the torment I feel inside is so immense. I want, I really want to just be able to relax and to focus on the conversations I have with people. I do not want to be consumed with jealousy and fear and obsession any more. I want to enjoy my life finally, and not look at people with suspicion and doubt in my mind, but to just enjoy their company and to believe that they actually mean me no harm.

As an afterthought, I have also recently tried to get a little more into Buddhism, I read another guy’s story on the page and I totally agree that it is a good approach for recognizing your thoughts for what they are - they are not the truth, and all they are doing is blinding you to what is real. I know this is logical, still, I really have to control myself and focus hard to realize that all this pain is coming from within myself.

My computer blew up. Literally. Loud bang. Smoke. And the house mains tripped off. That’s a relatively catastrophic computer failure.

I don’t know if it took out the mother board or not as it’s a proprietary power supply (Sony Vaio). So I can’t just stick another one in there easily. So I went into debt (for the next decade or so) and picked up a new system. Also decided since I was getting a new system get it with Vista (with some trepidation). I have to say I don’t regret that at all. It runs great with no problems. I basically got a gaming system with no proprietary crap in it so it will be very easy to swap out parts and stuff for the foreseeable future.

All that is to say I am still here and back online. It’s amazing how big a part of my life using a computer is. Didn’t really notice until I didn’t have one…

Gene Triggers Obsessive Compulsive Disorder-Like Syndrome in Mice: Study Suggests New Treatment Targets: National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)
Using genetic engineering, researchers have created an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) - like set of behaviors in mice and reversed them with antidepressants and genetic targeting of a key brain circuit. The study, by National Institutes of Health (NIH) -funded researchers, suggests new strategies for treating the disorder.