as someone who has not gotten a diagnosis, i’m wondering how everyone else went about their evaluations? what were the signs that made you question if you had ocd and how did you manage to get the courage to get diagnosed?? i always wonder what’s wrong with me and feel like whenever i try to put a label on it, i’m a bad person for even trying to think i have something and that maybe this is all just a normal experience.
you’re not a bad person for trying to help YOURSELF. I personally just stared putting what I felt on the internet & why I felt that way & everything led to OCD.. I have the symptoms.. so then I stared talking to my grandma about it & she got me an appointment with a psychiatrist, I then stared writing down on the notes app what I was comfortable sharing to the psychiatrist for a diagnosis. So when I showed her some of my intrusive thoughts she immediately said it was OCD & prescribed me zoloft.. I recommend writing it down & share what you’re comfortable sharing <3
@username ☮️ thank you for the encouragement, it means a lot! i’m still getting used to sharing these sort of thoughts with people (and admitting myself that i have them) but i will try my best!! i hope things are going well for you.
I googled what I was experiencing and Scrupulosity OCD came up. I was like that's me!! It was still a couple of years before I started doing anything about it.
@Rhonda Byrd thank you for sharing!
I noticed myself checking and rechecking things at work.
@Anonymous thank you!
howdy, hope this helps but to start you’re not a bad person and nothing is wrong with you, you just like everyone else here just has to work a little harder than some people. anyways, for me i knew someone with ocd and mentioned very similar but less severe symptoms at the time until it got worse and i had to courage to go to a program was properly diagnosed at a php program, but any therapist/psychiatrist at least at a program facility can “properly” diagnose you. (i say quotations due to im not someone who knows how diagnosis’ work)
@j_haydn2 this did help, thank you for the information and reassurance :’)
I went through a psychosis episode, that dwindled away slowly, then I started having intrusive images of terrible things then my thoughts were in a repetitive circle of the last things on earth I want to think about. I thought I was turning in to a monster and was almost certain I had to off myself before I harmed someone I loved or a child. After going through that I had not a fear of any judgment of anybody but God's so I decided to seek professional advice and soon found out that I have OCD. I wish you the best and hope you get your "you" back.
@struggles your experience sounds very similar to mine—i hope things have been going okay for you, and i hope you get your “you” back too!
If you had a college counselor tell you that you have OCD and even said he would play my story on an OCD commercial if he could, would you say I have been diagnosed? He technically can’t diagnose because he works for a college (even though he has a PHD in counseling). I’ve also been prescribed zoloft from my doctor for ocd but she didn’t technically diagnose me either. I always feel slightly ashamed for talking about ocd on social media because I haven’t TECHNICALLY been diagnosed. Can anyone relate to this or can give their opinion on if they think it matters that I haven’t been officially diagnosed? Then again, I’m not even sure what that process looks like.
The day I get officially diagnosed, I almost can’t WAIT to let certain people know and post things about it and raise awareness for it etc. I’m excited to explore OCD. But I feel like I’m just doing this for attention / for pity and sympathy. It’s bad, and I know that, but I’ve always loved it. And this often makes me think that I don’t have OCD, I’m just telling myself I do so I can be unique and special. Personally, I found out about OCD through reading an article about a harm ocd sufferer and then telling myself that I too wanted to kill my family. It was distressing. However I can identify traces of OCD prior to that. I frantically worried that I had HIV (health) & I frantically worried that life was all just a simulation (existential). I also suffered with confessions and the need to tell people the bad things I’d done. But I still wonder if I really am just putting it on, because this excitement to tell people isn’t exactly conventional. Nobody WANTS OCD, so why do I?
So the fact that i haven’t been officially diagnosed kind of makes my ocd worse. I’ve kind of become positive that I have it. Thinking back now, I can think of a few rituals I did as a child that could be seen as warning signs for OCD, but the debilitating stuff happened about 5 months ago in October. I saw a therapist for about a month and a half but she never gave me an official diagnosis and even though I asked, she just said it hasn’t been long enough to tell. It seemed like she wasn’t helping at all and wasn’t doing anything for me I couldn’t hear off of a forum such as this or an informative YouTube video so I quit going. I had problems this entire time but just this past week it has spiked up to the severity it was when it first started and is once again making me desperate for help! I think I want meds this time so I want to go to my regular doctor and ask. I guess my general question is how should I go about seeking help and can I say I have OCD even if it wasn’t officially told to me? This week has been very debilitating and the fact that I’ve been suffering for 5 months makes me believe this isn’t going to just go away.
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