So I’ve been terrified of taking antidepressants due to my suicide OCD, but my mental health has gotten so bad I’m finally deciding to give it a try again cause idk what else to to, I’ve tried natural stuff and it never works. But my question is, when you’re already having really bad intrusive thoughts how can you know it’s not from the medicine? My main fear is the medicine making me suicidal for real and me not being able to distinguish between the two.. I’ve taken an SSRI before but stopped after a few days cause I got scared like well what if the medicine is causing and will make me act on these thoughts?? (Hope this makes sense lol)

I’m not suicidal by any means, I had a thought one time when I was going through some stuff and ever since then I wake up every morning and think about it all day I have thoughts like “did I mean that?” “Did I want that?” “Am I gonna think this all day” “would I really do that” and literally it’s to the point it’s driving me nutssss please tell me I’m not alone and please tell me how you got through this, I started antidepressants about 6 days ago it’s called Effexor for the mean time I need some advice

So, I’ve had my OCD mostly “under control” for the past 10 years (I’m 44, battled this all my life). I’ve been on a high dosage of Luvox, but unfortunately it’s lost its effectiveness about 6 months ago. For the past five months I’ve also been doing therapy sessions on this site and have had a fairly good outcome. My main obsessions have mainly regarded around balance and symmetry. Anyhow, I’m in the process of switching to Prozac. It’s only been 6 days, so I obviously feel nothing yet. I made the foolish mistake of googling “What can antidepressants cause?” Unfortunately I found a very recent article of a study showing antidepressant users have a higher chance of getting ALS. There’s also older articles that say the opposite. But this one article FREAKED ME OUT. And I can only focus on the worst outcome. So, now I’m stuck in a repetitive thought pattern of getting ALS from the one medication that is supposed to help me. It’s absolutely terrifying and I haven’t experienced a health anxiety fear like this in years. I want to research more and more online, but I know this won’t help. It will only make things worse. Anyone with health anxiety have any advice on how to conquer this? I’m standing strong and not getting off my medication or doing any research.

I'm new to NOCD and have been dealing with harm/suicidal, and Pure OCD for some time now. It started off being healthy related anxiety that led to compulsion where I would research information on an uncommon illness or something I thought I had. Now it has snowballed into intrusive thoughts and images of me killing myself in various ways or my wife. The former is what has been the most debilitating and hardest to shake. Recently I seem to find triggers almost every where I look. "What if I killed myself this way" if I see a kitchen knife or a bottle of pills. A friend talked about going to a gun range a while back and an image popped up of me being there and turning a gun to myself which is something I dont want to do. I love life and its so painful to go through thoughts that try to tell me otherwise. That particular image/thought has really stuck with me. I know about ERP and my therapist said I could rip the bandaid off and go to a gun range but it terrifies me. I don't own any weapons but I often think, "what if I buy one and im actually suicidal?" Just typing it makes me anxious. I'm wanting to start a low dose of Prozac which opens up another can of worms about worried my "overdose thought" will come true, on top of potential side effects. This is long winded but im looking for any advice to get through this. I know others are worse off than me but considering I've never been like this and it only started 6 months ago, I'm really struggling. Thanks everyone.