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OCD: The Monster That Lives In My Head
By Patrick Omari

 It's because of the monster, I told my friends. You can't stay the night at my flat because of the monster.


No, I wasn't talking about the one who lives in the wardrobe. He's scared of strangers. I'm talking about the monster in my head that makes me wash my hands dozens of times a day because I'm terrified of germs.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD if you can't be bothered to say the whole thing. There, I've said it. I've admitted it, I've named him. The dark secret I carry around with me, that I joke about so you don't guess at the real nightmare behind it, there it is.

OCD is the reason why I have the face of a girl in her late twenties, but the hands of someone who's spent the past 40 years as a scullery maid. Why when you see me washing my hands in the ladies', using more soap than a surgeon, I've not been working down a sewer - that's just how I wash my hands all the time. I get through bottles and bottles of handcream not because I want baby-soft skin but because if I don't use it every time I wash my hands, I can't even bend my fingers comfortably.

So I'm a crazy weirdo with no friends and no life who should crawl away in shame and hide under a stone, right? Wrong, although that's how some people appear to make me want to feel, and that's often exactly how I do feel (OCD doesn't exactly do wonders for your self-esteem). But my condition, which can take many forms - such as compulsive checking, compulsive hoarding, repeated actions or an obsession with order - is shared by as many as three per cent of the population. If you don't have it yourself, you probably know someone who does - and just like me, they probably have a job, family, friends, interests and everything else that a 'normal' person has. I put 'normal' in quote marks because I actually don't believe there's any such thing.

I don't know what caused my OCD. It is known that the brains of people with OCD are different from the brains of people who don't have it, and some scientists believe people are born with a predisposition to the condition. Some also believe that life experience plays a part. All I can say is that I don't remember a time when I didn't have it, to some extent. It wasn't very bad when I was little, but I was always worried about germs, and I washed my hands often enough and thoroughly enough for the other girls at school to sneer.

When I moved away from home, it worsened, because I had to deal with situations I hadn't dealt with before. Having been brought up to adhere to strict hygiene standards, and being the sort of person who tends to follow instructions to the letter, when others failed to obey those rules I assumed catastrophic consequences were inevitable. And I thought it was my responsibility to put right their 'wrongs' by disinfecting our student house to within an inch of its life, getting through several bottles of Dettol a week. How my housemates put up with me is anyone's guess.

But it was when I was alone in the south of France, working as an English language assistant, that OCD stopped making my life difficult and started to make it hell. With no friends around me and nothing in my life except a job I loathed, I found one other thing I could focus on: keeping clean. I hated the place so much I became convinced it was crawling with lethal germs, and as my unhappiness and loneliness grew, my craziness spiralled out of control until I was cleaning, washing and disinfecting from the moment I came in from school until, during the final few weeks, two or three o'clock in the morning. I barely ate or slept, my weight dropping to less than seven stone (and I'm supermodel height). I was a wreck when I came home, mentally, physically and emotionally, and on the verge of becoming seriously ill.

But since then, though it's been a long, slow road and there's still a long way to go, I've walked it back to some kind of normality. To the outsider I'm just the crazy girl who screams and runs when she sees a dog because she thinks they're so filthy, but to me, I eat, I sleep, I have friends, I have a job, I have fun, I have a life. As time passes there are always more and more things I can do that I wouldn't or couldn't before. My OCD sometimes stops me doing things, but not that often. It makes my life more difficult than it needs to be, but it no longer makes it impossible.

You want to know, of course, why when I can see my behavior is unreasonable, I don't just stop it. Because I'm afraid to. Terrified to. There's a part of my brain that tells me that if I don't devote all my energies to being clean, terrible things will happen to me. It's got a really loud voice, so loud that all the logic and reason in the world can't drown it out. I'm afraid not only of being ill, and having myself to blame, but also of not living up to my own standards. If I don't keep myself scrupulously clean, my brain tells me I've been lazy and dirty, that I'm unworthy, that I don't deserve to enjoy myself or be happy. I guess it's the same voice that tells me I've failed at everything I do if it isn't perfect, that I can never deserve the friendship or love of others, but that's another story!

Of course there's still miles to go, and whether I can achieve this without help from a therapist is another question. I know that my OCD will never go away entirely, but I accept that. I can't imagine what life would be like without it anyway. It's part of who I am, as much as the colour of my hair - and it can be a force for good as well as evil.

That may sound crazy, but over the last few years I've learned that no-one is okay. Everyone has their issues, and some are deeper than others, but whether it's nervous breakdowns, eating disorders, depression or something else, there is no-one on this planet who won't see mental health issues affect them or someone close to them. Unfortunately, people can also be incredibly judgmental about mental health issues, and if my own experiences have helped me to be more understanding of others then I'm grateful for them. I don't enjoy standing at the sink washing my hands for the hundredth time that day, but if it's a choice between that and sneering at or getting angry with someone else with my condition, hurting them because I don't understand it, I'll choose the former every time.

At least I'm keeping soap manufacturers in business. And if you come to my house for dinner you can be damn sure you won't find a fly in your soup.

Patrick is an expert Research and Travel consultant. His current interest is in Inverness airport hotels and Dover port parking.
 
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