Anxiety disorders – Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

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Anxiety disorders are not the same as the nervousness or anxiety we all experience before taking an exam, making an important decision, or dealing with a problem at work. They are different in that they interfere with your ability to lead a normal life.

If you are wondering what the difference is between an anxiety attack and a disorder, then let me try to explain. Anxiety attacks usually occur after a build up of nervous energy. If however you worry constantly that something is likely to happen, or fear the anxiety attack symptoms will recur, this could be considered an anxiety disorder.

There are several types including specific phobias, generalized anxiety disorder, post traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), panic attacks, separation anxiety, agoraphobia and the main concern of this article, OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder)

If you suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder you are likely to be overwhelmed by anxiety symptoms causing you constant fears and thoughts, which make you need to carry out certain routines or rituals. The rituals are usually known as compulsions and the disturbing thoughts rituals, for example if you have an unreasonable fear of germs, you would constantly wash you hands.

I can give you an actual example of this, as I had a young man stay in my home with this condition, which was really extreme. He constantly washed his hands in hot water running from the tap, and didn’t even trust a towel to wipe them on. This meant he walked around all the time with water dripping from his sleeves, and it was not long before I had to replace the carpet in his room because it smelt moldy and was rotting, and the smell was starting to filter through the rest of the house.

He never allowed anyone in his room apart from myself to clean it once a week when he was out. The vacuum cleaner I used was for his room only and I had to promise that I would never use it anywhere else where any of my other residents had been. One day he decided to have a phone line installed, so that he could have email access, but he suffered for weeks and weeks afterwards because the BT engineer had been in his room. When he left the house he always carried a piece of cloth with him to open and close doors.

On another occasion I packed his lunch for him, and put it in a well-known supermarkets plastic carrier bag, only to be told that he could not have his lunch in this particular brand of carrier bag.

I guess you will have realized by now that this young mans problems extended beyond anxiety disorders, but he was fortunate enough to have strong backing from the local mental health team and a practitioner who referred him on to a psychiatrist for anxiety treatment. However he refused to take drugs, not because he was worried about anxiety medication side effects, but because someone would have handled them in the packaging stage.

~HealthCrazed.com

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