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A new inpatient mental health unit for children and youth will provide community-level support at Oak Valley Health's Markham Stouffville Hospital.

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Everyone has done something, unintentionally or not, to hurt another person and later felt guilty about it. When Luther Wood felt as if he’d wronged someone, his guilt took on a life of its own, dominating his thoughts as he replayed the incident over and over. “I was just terrified that I was causing hurt to somebody else,” says Wood, now 18. “I would feel an overwhelming sense of guilt in my life as a little kid.”

These types of intrusive, seemingly never-ending thought cycles are a hallmark of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which, in hindsight, Wood can see traces of all the way back to his early childhood. It became much worse as a teenager. Whether it was a rough-and-tumble session with his brother or an untoward thought about a friend, he couldn’t stop himself from dwelling on it, mentally punishing himself for what would be innocuous to anyone else. “These thoughts would come up, and then I would sit on it for as long as I could before I would kind of just explode,” he says. “I’d have to admit everything to my parents, which was kind of a compulsion in itself.”

OCD is typically portrayed in pop culture as compulsive organizing or handwashing. In reality, the worst part is those unprovoked thoughts, which often drive the sufferer to perform repetitive behaviours to stop them.

“I just thought that was kind of who he was,” explains Luther’s mom, Julia Wood. “I didn’t at all understand the deeper level of the emotional and mental burden, or how it grows and takes over every aspect of your life.”

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