Reddit mentions of The OCD Workbook: Your Guide to Breaking Free from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Hey there, sorry to hear that your parents aren't taking your mental health seriously. Unfortunately, what you describe is very common. People who don't have mental disorders themselves don't realize how excruciatingly painful and debilitating they can be for sufferers. My mother did not really take my mental health issues seriously until a year or two ago, when my OCD got so bad I actually collapsed in the middle of the street, screaming (I was beyond coping with the intensity of the thoughts) and had to be scraped up by an ambulance. I was flipping out in ER. My mother finally came to visit me after she heard about this. I think when she came in and saw me huddled up in a corner, shivering, gibbering, dishevelled, unable to leave the house and clearly not OK (and having lost a lot of weight with the worry)...she was like 'Ah! It's real!'. I think the sight of me looking such an obvious mess brought it home at that moment, that no, this was NOT just 'attention-seeking' or something I'd 'grow out of', this was a very genuine madness. So, you know...don't feel alone in having parents who are skeptical and uninformed about mental health issues. OCD in particular unfortunately gets joked about and trivialised a lot. People don't realise the huge impact it can have.

If your parents take science seriously and woud listen to a scientific source, perhaps you could show them the evidence that people with untreated OCD often have big problems at school? Because intrusive thoughts and obsessions ruin your concentration, your grades can really suffer. Maybe your grades would be even better than they are now if you have more space in your mind to think clearly? I'm not saying this to panic you or give you extra stress, it's just most parents are concerned about their child's grades. Maybe if they don't take mental illness seriously they'll take your grades seriously! The study I'm thinking of is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29141084 Look to the final sentence, where it says that OCD can have a profound impact on your educational attainment.

Your parents assertion that medication will make you 'a zombie' is nonsense based on old stereotypes from 1970's movies about mental asylums. Early mental health drugs like Lithium which do this are a) often replaced nowadays by more efficient newer versions and b) were never used to treat OCD anyway! Your parents are thinking of a different disorder, probably bipolar or schizophrenia. The current drugs for OCD do NOT turn anyone into 'a zombie' - yes, they have issues and I agree they are imperfect, and can have side effects, but one thing they won't do is leave you a sleepy, drooling, fuzzyheaded wreck. Actually, it would be nice if they did. That sounds pleasant compared to obsessing. If only they were that relaxing! :D I'm not nagging you for your parents beliefs (I know you're not responsible for them), I just mean that their information is out-of-date and inaccurate. The standard meds for OCD are Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI's), also called 'antidepressants', and they are welcome to read about how these work on OCD on a user-friendly site like this: https://www.drugs.com/comments/fluvoxamine/for-obsessive-compulsive-disorder.html .

I understand what you're saying about fearing your thoughts will get you reported to the police or a mental hospital etc. This is a common fear for OCD sufferers. Please don't feel alone about it. Many of us have had to navigate this issue. It's so common that OCD charities actually offer an specially-tailored information sheet you can take to the doctor with you when describing symptoms, so that the doctor doesn't mistakenly do the wrong thing: https://ocduk.org/ice-breaker . I can't give you a 100% guarantee that an ignorant doctor wouldn't accidentally judge you a risk (you're not; people with OCD aren't), but I do know that it would all get sorted out with futher investigation. A psychiatrist who was properly-trained in this are would be able to recognise that you were describing OCD symptoms and were thus no danger. There isn't a chance that you would end up somehow trapped in a jail cell or a mental hospital long-term for no reason. I mean Jesus, the mental hospitals are so overfilled these days it's difficult to actually get INTO the bloody things. I had to seriously fight to even get a place in one! So don't think that they're going around with empty beds just looking for random people to fill up the hospital...! :D

Psychiatrists are also supposed to keep client information confidential. This means they don't tell your parents or anyone else without your written permission. Unless they have direct information that you pretty much have a bomb hidden under your bed and you really are going to blow up the school tomorrow, they are not supposed to go around telling other people your private details.

HOWEVER it sounds like maybe what you need, in the absense of a therapist, is some self-directed therapy? If you're genuinely unable to see a professional, the good news is that you can DIY your own treatment for OCD, and the evidence shows that you can get good results this way! The therapist makes things easier, it's true, and gives you guidance. But you could still probably help yourself a LOT if you followed a treatment plan alone.

You would use a good tool that helped you design therapy exercises and understand the principles of the therapy used for OCD. It's called Exposure and Response Prevention therapy (ERP) and it works by confronting your fears until you get desensitized to them. This calms the obsessions down and gives you fewer, weaker intrusive thoughts. Sometimes it can even get rid of symptoms completely. A tool you could use would be a good self-help book on OCD techniques like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Overcoming-Obsessive-Compulsive-Disorder-Books/dp/1849010722/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511591414&sr=8-1&keywords=overcoming+ocd , or a workbook you could write in and plan therapy with: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ocd-Workbook-Breaking-Obsessive-Compulsive-Disorder/dp/1572244224/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511591511&sr=1-1&keywords=ocd+workbook

Or you can use an OCD recovery app like nOCD: https://www.treatmyocd.com/

or if you're more of a visual learner, there are loads of Youtube videos by OCD experts that explain how to use ERP to overcome your fears. Mark Freeman's channel, Everybody Has a Brain, for example, has a lot of tips on OCD recovery (Mark himself had very severe OCD and he used these methods to make a full recovery): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laeYq51SYA0

There are also safe substances you can buy online and take yourself, if you can't get a medication prescription. Since most current OCD medication doesn't work amazingly well, the DIY option is sometimes just as good. Pm me if you want the evidence from the scientific papers, but I can tell you here that ashwagandha (a herbal anti-anxiety medication), magnesium, zinc, inositol and b-vitamin supplements have all been demonstrated to help reduce OCD symptoms. And these can be bought on ebay or at a health food store, so you don't need to involve a parent if they're being unsympathetic. They're generally very safe and difficult to overdose on, which is why they are judged harmless enough to be sold freely without a prescription.

It sounds like you're got a really clear-headed, mature grasp of the problem, which is a great start. A lot of people come to OCD therapy very convinced and upset about their particular obsession, and not realising that these obsessive thoughts are just thoughts, not actual real issues they need to fix. By this I mean that a person with fears about germs doesn't need to 'fix' the prolem by literally disinfecting everything in sight, but that their thoughts about the germs are over-exaggerated and unrealistic, and the problem can be solved by changing how they think. Your insight into this aspect seems good, which is a great head-start!

All the best to you and I hope that you can make progress in overcoming your OCD, with or without your parents taking your mental health seriously!