Empowered Patient

"Here's What It Really Feels Like To Have OCD... Welcome To My Brain"

- Cecelia Scheeler

One of my earliest memories is of my mother massaging moisturizer into the raw skin of my red and bleeding hands, her palms dwarfing mine as she coated them in Lubriderm. She had just pulled me away from yet another hand-washing marathon.

These were the early days of my obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), when an intense fear of germs compelled me to scrub my hands until they were the texture of steel wool. I remember trying to squirm out of my mother’s grip — the lotion she used burned where it seeped into the cracks in my skin. I was diagnosed when I was 4.

That fear of contamination is a hallmark of OCD — the Wikipedia page for the disorder features an image of a man washing his hands — but intense germophobia represents only one form OCD can take. The only constants of this mental disorder are excessive and unreasonable thoughts that typically compel people with OCD to do the same thing over and over. I’m in the 1.2% of the adult population in this country that suffers from OCD, and over my long psychiatric history, I’ve experienced just about every type of symptom, from needing to perform certain physical activities (as a child, I had to bang my chair against the floor exactly eight times before sitting at my desk) to over checking.