You've Heard of OCD, But Do You Really Understand It?
Big Think and the Mental Health Channel are proud to launch Big Thinkers on Mental Health, a new series dedicated to open discussion of anxiety, depression, and the many other psychological...
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We all have intrusive thoughts from time to time and many of us, for example, will check whether we have our airplane ticket before going to the airport more than once. That isn’t OCD. To have OCD you have to have obsessions and compulsions that impair your life and are highly distressing. And a sort of a rule book would be maybe at least an hour a day but most of the patients that I work with will obsess and compulse for hours a day and really their life can be ruined. I have some patients that will come to me and say look, I know I don’t need to be washing my hands like this but I can’t stop. And I have other patients who are really not sure, really not sure – I mean they really believe that if they don’t wash maybe they’ll actually get ill. So ...
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We all have intrusive thoughts from time to time and many of us, for example, will check whether we have our airplane ticket before going to the airport more than once. That isn’t OCD. To have OCD you have to have obsessions and compulsions that impair your life and are highly distressing. And a sort of a rule book would be maybe at least an hour a day but most of the patients that I work with will obsess and compulse for hours a day and really their life can be ruined. I have some patients that will come to me and say look, I know I don’t need to be washing my hands like this but I can’t stop. And I have other patients who are really not sure, really not sure – I mean they really believe that if they don’t wash maybe they’ll actually get ill. So ...
