I believe I have undiagnosed OCD but was wondering if anyone else goes through this struggle. I constantly think of ways my loved ones might die. Whether that be from an event happening or a situation I am in with them and I am afraid to leave them in fear that they will die and I will be left alone. For example, I could be indoors with my family and they all go outside without me. I immediately imagine a tornado coming up, knocking over a tree and killing my family with me left to survive. Or I think of certain scenarios where a disease (especially with Covid-19 going around) could infect a loved one and my mind creates vivid images of how they could die of the disease. Does anyone else experience this? How do you cope?

I haven't been officially diagnosed with OCD but when I learned more about it, I never related to anything more. A little back story: when I was younger, there were a couple of youth suicides in my area and the schools felt the need to have someone come in and talk about suicide. Well the person they had come in did a horrible job teaching it and basically made it seem like the smallest negative emotion or feeling or change in behavior made you suicidal. This ended up scaring me so much that I got horrid anxiety. Fast forward to now, Everytime I feel anxiety and panic, I fear I'm going to kill myself. Everytime I feel down and depressed, I fear I'll end it all. I'm scared to be around anything sharp because the "What if" I hurt myself comes into my mind. There are always intrusive thoughts at almost every point of the day. And it's not only for me. Everytime I hear someone being negative, I fear they will be suicidal. I know in my heart that none of this is true but it's terrifying me that it's stuck around so much that it makes me scared that maybe it is true. I've had a lot of death in my family in the past year and a half and a lot of other family drama that I'd never had before that is now also bringing up existential intrusive thoughts. And I'd never questioned anything about life before but now I get the "why is life like this?" and "does anything we do matter?" and I hate it. I don't want to think like that. I just want to go through life being able to handle things normally again. It terrifies me even right now going "what if you give up?"

I feel like there’s no way out of this. everyday i’m anxious and depressed from these thoughts. i feel like i have to constantly question if it’s OCD or not. the panic attacks are insane and i freak out. and a compulsion i have is looking eveything up on the internet when im stressing to know that it’s just my OCD and im not in danger. but looking things up add on to my thoughts and i start thinking “what if” actual suidcal people think. do others with this theme whenever they do something like if im taking a picture it’ll be like “yeah you look happy people will wonder what happened when your gone” LIKE i DO NOT want to end my life. or even as simple as cleaning my room, “yup keep it clean so when your family goes through your stuff” then i panic and can’t even do anything. those thoughts distress me so bad. i’ll sit there and think how good my life is or when im having a good day my thoughts will be like “NOPEEE what if your just saying that to convince yourself” it never shuts up and genuinely makes me think i have SI or something. i hope this reaches the right people just to know im not alone. Even when i do get better in the back of my mind it’s always “people who want to are the same a day before too” im genuinely scared and im scared one day im going to just snap and do it because its “too much” do i need to go to a mental hospital! i feel insane.

It started when I became an adult, and started receiving my mental health diagnosis. I hyper fixated on each and every action I did and how it could be related to my diagnosis’s. It then lead to fixation to my physical health — making appointments and seeing every specialist I can to rule out every possibility. I currently have been suffering with obstructive sleep. I woke up the past few days with severe pain from the lack of sleep whilst believing I was oversleeping. Luckily my fit watch tracks my sleep cycle and it turns out I am not receiving any sleep. I had an extreme panic attack — bursting into tears on the phone with my mom wondering what this case might be. She told me it could be sleep apnea and that a simple sleep study could figure this out. However, knowing my family history I made appointments to every specialist I can to make sure it is nothing serious. The unknown of health can be scary to me. Watching my mother suffer with her physical health chronically since I was a child lead me to be very conscious and aware of how my body is functioning. This morning was one of the worst moments of physical pain. I should just take one step at a time with the sleep doctor instead of taking measures to see every specialist that could pertain with this issue. However, that is very hard to me. I don’t want to ever wake up in the pain I was this morning. Does anyone else suffer with health-related OCD? And if so, how do you find a sense of ease during moments like I expressed?