Obsessive Compulsive Behaviors Essay

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Obsessive-Compulsive Behaviors

"Compulsive" and "obsessive" have become everyday words. "I'm

compulsive" is how some people describe their need for neatness, punctuality,

and shoes lined up in the closets. "He's so compulsive is shorthand for calling

someone uptight, controlling, and not much fun. "She's obsessed with him" is a

way of saying your friend is hopelessly lovesick. That is not how these words

are used to describe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or OCD, a strange and

fascinating sickness of ritual and doubts run wild. OCD can begin suddenly and

is usually seen as a problem as soon as it starts.

Compulsives (a term for patients who mostly ritualize) and obsessives

(those who think of something over and over again) rarely have rituals or

thoughts about nuetral questions or behaviors. What are their rituals about?

There are several possible ways to list symptoms of OCD. All sources agree that

the most common preoccupations are dirt (washing, germs, touching), checking for

safety or closed spaces (closets, doors, drawers, appliances, light switches),

and thoughts, often thoughts about unacceptable violent, sexual, or crude

behavior.

When the thoughts and rituals of OCD are intense, the victim's work and

home life disintigrate. Obsessions are persistant, senseless, worrisome, and

often times, embarrassing, or frightening thoughts that repeat over and over in

the mind in an endless loop. The automatic nature of these recurant thoughts

makes them difficult for the person to ignore or restrain successfully.

The essence of a Compulsive Personality Disorder is normally found in a

restricted person, who is a perfectionist to a degree that demands that others

to submit to hisher way of doing things. A compulsive personality is also often

indecisive and excessively devoted to work to the exclusion of pleasure. When

pleasure is considered, it is something to be planned and worked for.

Pleasurable activities are usually postponed and sometimes never even enjoyed.

With severe compulsions, endless rituals dominate each day. Compulsions are

incredibly repetitive and seemingly purposeful acts that result from the

obsessions. The person performs certain acts according to certain rules or in a

stereotypical way in order to prevent or avoid unsympathetic consequences.

People with compulsive personalities tend to be excessively moralistic, and

judgmental of themselves and others.

Senseless thoughts that recur over and over again appearing out of the

blue; certain "magical" acts are repeated over and over. For some the thoughts

are meaningless like numbers, one number or several, for others they are highly

charged ideas-for example, "I have just killed someone." The intrusion into

conscious everyday thinking of such intense, repetitive, and to the victim

disgusting and alien thoughts is a dramatic and remarkable experience. You

can't put them out of your mind, that's the nature of the obsessions.

Some patients are "checkers," they check lights, doors, locks-ten,

twenty or a hundred times. Others spend hours producing unimportant symmetry.

Shoelaces must be exactly even, eyebrows identical to eachother. A case studied

by the well-known art therapist, Judith Aron Rubin, Rubin tells of a young girl

named Mary, who suffers from OCD, and how she drives her fellow waitresses

frantic because she goes into a tailspin if the salt and pepper she has arranged

in a certain order has been moved around. All of the OCD problems have common

themes: you can't trust good judgment, you can't trust your eyes that see no

dirt, or really believe that the door is locked. You know you have done nothing

harmful but in spite of this good sense you must go on checking and counting.

There are many, many common obsessions, of all of them the most common

is called "washing" this involves the victim to have a constant feeling of

conamination, dirt andor grime all over their body. The book,The Boy Who

Couldn't Stop Washing by Judith L. Rapoport describes a long, sad case of a

young boy who spent three or more hours in the shower each day. The boy "felt

sure" that there was some sticky substance on his skin. He thought of nothing

else.

Our normal functioning probably consists of constant uncountable

checking, a sort of radar operation, that we could not do contiously and still

act efficiently. Something has gone wrong with the process for obsessive

compulsives, the usual shut-off such as "my hands are clean enough" or "I saw

the gas was turned off on the stove" or "The door was locked." does not get

through. Everyday life becomes dominated by doubts, leading to senseless

repetition and ritual.

Obsessive phobias tend to have distinct features. According to Issac

Marks, "They are usually part of a variety of fears of potential situations

themselves. Because of the vagueness of these possibilities, ripples of

avoidance and protective rituals spread far and wide to involve the patients

life style and people around himher. Clinical examination usually discloses

obsessive rituals not directly connected with the professed fear; instead the

obsessive fear is part of a wider obsessive-compulsive disorder."(Marks,1969)

"The sustained experience of obsessions andor compulsions." make up

what the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders, 3rd edition, calls Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. It has also

been called obsessional nuerosis. Psychiatrists have been fascinated by this

disorder for over a hundred years. Priests have described symptoms like these

for much longer than that.(A.P.A.,80)

Children suffer from OCD with exactly the same symptoms as adults.

Normally an early start in mental disorder is unusual. Other mental illnesses,

such as depression or schitzophrenia often apear in a differant form in young

children and in any case are much more rare in children than in adults. But with

OCD it is the same at any age.

In the book The Boy Who Couln't Stop Washing, there is a story of a

fourteen-year-old girl who has been diagnosed with OCD. As she is talking to

her psychiatrist she says, "I have really lost touch with myself and that is

really frightening. I wish I could get the 'old Sally' back. I...

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