Dr. Alex George

And so I tell you now, I mean, the amount of suffering I've had with OCD, I would in a heartbeat give up everything.

every possession I have to have never experienced that and be free from it.

So OCD is a cyclical experience of thinking.

And if you start with a negative fear that you have or a belief about yourself and you wind tighter and tighter and tighter, eventually, you know, in the beginning you might be able to cope.

and pedal away and keep working, but eventually your sense of self becomes eroded.

You start believing that you are a certain person or that a certain outcome is likely.

If you're, say, obsessed, the fact that you're going to get sick tomorrow and die, that belief might become more frightening and worse and worse and worse and tighter and tighter until eventually you see no way out.

You become so depressed and low and anxious that there seems no way forward.

And when there's no way forward, people feel there's no way out or that there's only one way out.

And so, you know, the rates of suicide with OCD are, you know, not insignificant for that reason because suddenly you feel very alone.

I think OCD is very clever.

Again, the reason why people don't get diagnosed for decades is because you feel it's just you.

You are the problem.

I am problemed in myself.

and that no one else can see it or understand it because it's something I need to fix.

In fact, lots of people with OCD will go living throughout their lives where no one else has a clue.

Even their partners won't know that they have OCD because, for example, what they call pure O, so pure OCD, the idea is that there's no external compulsions, that all of it's in your mind, the fact-checking, rumination, the reassurance thing, it's not physical things.

Many of that can just exist solely in the mind and so no one would ever know.

So you can end up in a hell of a state

without anyone having a clue, and just think, you know what, I give up, life's not worth living, or I'm a terrible person, I don't deserve to be alive, which is a common theme in OCD.