I am frustrated that my OCD was misdiagnosed as hypochondria.

Was anyone else ever misdiagnosed as having something instead of OCD? Because when I started obsessing five years ago, I had intrusive thoughts about death, which led the doctors to believe that I wanted to harm myself when in reality it was my OCD. So, I was diagnosed with depression, and got treatment for that rather than OCD. It wasn’t until earlier this year they realized I was suffering from OCD.

Wondering if anyone is in the same boat… For a bit of background, I’m 21 now and am away at university and have finally taken the first steps towards getting mental health help, but I can’t help but wonder why none of my many signs of ocd were caught by those around me sooner 😕 Beginning at around the age of 8 years old (maybe even younger to be honest) I had a compulsion to step on cracks just the right way, if I didn’t step on the very middle of the crack I would stop, go back and do it over again. If I turned my head around once, I needed to do it on the other side to be even, same thing with bumping into doors or walls, if I did it to one arm I needed to go back and do it to the other for symmetry. At school during quizzes or assessments I was almost always the last one done as I would double check my answers 10-20 times as a compulsion. My biggest was and still is knocking on wood three times, at my worst I was doing this from 50-100 times a day. Needless to say some of these (plus many many more) were pretty obvious, and looking back now I’m just kind of frustrated that no adults noticed and, if they did, especially during my younger years, that therapy or ERP wasn’t considered or suggested. I’m in a place now where I’m finally able to seek out mental health support myself, however it’s just frustrating there’s a 7 month wait list at my school when this likely could’ve been addressed over a decade earlier 😔

Have any of you ever felt that you were misdiagnosed from a provider who diagnosed you with something different than OCD? I have was previously diagnosed with depression and severe anxiety. I was put on medications that made me feel numb and I felt my head and thoughts were in a constant fog. I eventually chose to go off of them and slowly tapered off the medications intrusive thoughts came rushing back in like a Dam that cracked open; flooding everything around it. In the beginning, depression and anxiety diagnoses made sense because I believed that doctors know what they are doing because they are educated and trained in the field. As I began to question things, their diagnoses did not make sense. My intrusive and repetitive thoughts and actions made me feel like a horrible person, depressed, and anxious. I was told I had a chemical imbalance leading to my depression and anxiety, but I figured out what was really causing it was my thoughts. I eventually came across false memory OCD and other types of OCD that I never knew was OCD. I felt as though I finally knew what was going on and things would become easier by knowing, but in many ways things have not become easier. I feel that mental health awareness has improved, but the the services, education, and access to services have not caught up to the same extent with improving. I have learned that at the end of the day, it is important to not always accept what I am told by others including professionals and to question things. At the end of the day, it is myself that I am left with and nobody can know me the way that I do.