When someone doesn’t get the right treatment for serious mental health issues like OCD, it can take a major toll on nearly every part of their life. I think about my own journey—from as early as I can remember, untreated OCD controlled my life. The cost of the condition was terrible: it took a toll on the relationships that meant the most to me; it robbed me of my greatest potential and dreams; it even severely impacted my physical health. Living with untreated OCD had come at a terrible price by the time I found effective treatment. But it wasn’t too late, and I’m so glad I found it. Now I feel like I’m truly living, not just surviving. Read more about the high cost of letting OCD go untreated, and why the right OCD treatment is so valuable.

“Perhaps, for all those years, I would have lived rather than just survived.” Oh, this line right here speaks to my story so much. I have been surviving rather than living for so so long that I cannot even remember what it is like to actually just live my life. I have been in survival mode since I was 10 years old & a trauma happened to me. Fast forward until I was in my mid thirties when that trauma came back up again into my memory & I was no longer able to push it back down. I started therapy, 10 years worth of talk therapy. To which I was totally dependent on that time with my therapist every week. Little did I know that my ocd was eating up all of that reassurance I got from the therapist because they did not know I had ocd. I was only ever diagnosed with depression, anxiety & ptsd up until January of this year. With those talk therapist I would usually go into a session for n distress & by the time I left I felt better. I got used to that & then I needed it more & more, to feel better with reassurance. I didn’t know what I was doing exactly. I just knew that it made me feel better to have them talk & tell me things like it wasn’t my fault & I was a good person. I got really good at seeking out that reassurance only I still did not know that was what it was called that I was doing. Thanks to seeing a new psychiatrist nurse practioner this year who was very observant of what I was saying, she asked me if anyone had ever mentioned I could have ocd. She said from what I was saying it sounded a lot like ocd. From there I found NOCD & I have been working with a therapist here since. My recovery has been somewhat slow I think as it took me time to get comfortable with another new therapist & also not getting that quick reassurance fix & feeling better by the end of a therapy session. I struggled with that for a good while because that is s what I was used to with therapist. My therapist here kept telling me basically that I had to try different to get different results than what had not worked for me before.

I hope this is my story soon.

I just feel like I’m just existing at this point rather than actually living thoroughly. For all these years I wasn’t able to get the right proper treatment for my due to financial cost . It baffles me the government or whomever in charge of the health care system does not do anything for accessible affordable health care.

I wish NOCD offered a sliding scale. This treatment is so needed for so many people

The only problem is that it has already taken a major financial toll to the point where I owe a lot of people a lot of money. My insurance company only seems to cover outpatient through hospital programs, and after the last time I tried that, I don't really want to try that again. I need someone I can actually trust, but that comes at a major cost when I'm already asking people for money to survive (I do get a decent paycheck, I've just already dug myself a major hole.