How were you diagnosed with OCD? In my country it's being very hard to find a specialist in OCD. I talked with a GP and a psychologist about my situation and they both assumed I am a bissexual in denial. I told about having OBSESSIVE THOUGHTS ALL THE TIME for over 3 years and the psychologist said that he was totally used to people being in the stage of changing their sexuality and being in doubts and obsessed over it. He also said he would not diagnose me with any pathology, but rather try to understand what I am feeling and thinking and find the links with past and current events, etc. Any tips?

Ok, so first of all, I’m undiagnosed. However, I’ve been pretty certain for a while now that what I’ve been struggling with is OCD. My problem though is that it’s not easy to get diagnosed, and in some cases, it would require me to pay money. It frustrates me that I have to pay to deal with my mental health. Is it worth it for me to get diagnosed? I know I don’t need a diagnosis to start healing and working on these things, but I also don’t want to be “self diagnosing” the problem, because that makes me feel like a liar and an imposter. My other problem is that I fear my family doctor won’t properly diagnose me. I came to him about mental health related issues once before, and he read off a very generic list of mental health symptoms. when he got to what sounded like the ‘OCD’ section, we asked one or two very generic questions that had nothing to do with my themes, and since I couldn’t relate, I just answered no to them. He then told me I was fine, that I was just a “type A personality”, and that I was just being too hard on myself. I fear that my doctor might not be very knowledgeable or up to date on current information regarding OCD, and this might make it increasingly difficult for me to get diagnosed. Another problem is my symptoms seem to come and go. I often have an obsessive cycle that can last months at a time, and then it just goes away. Sometimes I won’t experience any symptoms for years. This makes me feel like I don’t actually have OCD or that it’s not ‘bad’ enough to be diagnosable.

hi! how did you guys get your ocd diagnosis? what was that process like? did it take a while? do some of you not have a diagnosis but just know you have ocd?

It all started 25 years ago in junior high school. At first it was the way I walked, I remember one day thinking that I was walking "like a girl" and needed to keep that in check. Already there was this theme of gender insecurity. Then HOCD hit and caused major depression for a few years. But it was nothing compared to the TOCD that replaced it and has plagued me to this day, because here I actually had reasons to believe I could be trans: around the age of 12 I started developing this debilitating bundle of social anxiety around other men, coupled with a feminization/submission kink which I think goes hand-in-hand with the social anxiety. At the root there is this feeling that I'm inferior to most men, so the interactions with them (or even just being around them) are very painful and fill my mind with images of myself being feminized, “sissified”, dominated sexually. I often resort to compulsively looking for some girl/woman nearby or anyone I feel is nonthreatening, to alleviate the mental turmoil. I constantly observe myself, how I move etc and anything vaguely “feminine” (whatever it means to my sick mind, I guess anything that shows vulnerability, sensitivity, empathy?) needs to be suppressed and countered with something stereo-typically masculine. And then when I'm alone and still drowning in all those disturbing feelings and thoughts, I start getting urges to embody that twisted self-image and seek sexual gratification from it, finding it very addictive and hard to resist probably because it has that shame and taboo component. The kind of bottomless rabbit hole that may lead to transitioning and living in fantasy-land 24/7 if you decide to embrace it, and reddit is full of men who do just that. So I think I got one of the worst deal of cards ever. The fact that there is a concrete basis for my gender OCD is why I’ve never tried to tackle all that stuff with OCD-specific therapy. So all I’ve been doing is try to “solve” the complex traumas that I assume are at the root of the feelings of crushing inferiority, but it’s far from clear how I should go about it. To be honest I’m still pretty much in the same spot I was decades ago fundamentally, which is incredibly depressing. Those issues have ruined my life so far, I have no friends, I’ve been unable to express my potential in career paths that required networking and socializing, I’m clinging to a dead-end job because I don’t see the point in trying something else when everything ends up tainted and ruined by the same old issues. In recent years I tried several treatments which improved my ability to break the thought loops, and to not beat myself up constantly for the painful interactions and shame-inducing urges, so in a sense they helped me function better and brought periods of relative optimism. But I don’t like the idea of being on meds for life especially if the root issues persist. And I’ve seen how the positive effects, quite radical at first, quickly fade off to a level where you start having very bad days again. With depressing side effects. So I don’t know, I feel like I’ve got multiple severe defects interacting and reinforcing one another, and frankly I’m getting very tired. I mean I also have attachment issues, so a healthy long-term relationship is incredibly unlikely and I actually have relationship OCD every time I try to get serious with someone. Too bad, because having a girlfriend is usually a major source of relief for all my gender insecurities, and normal sex tends to make my stupid trauma-fed kink go away. I don’t know what to do in terms of therapies, I believe my case would require daily work with a team of experts in various techniques but I’m just a nobody so I only have access to regular therapists, whom I always feel can’t handle the complexity I’m facing. Do you think I should still try to find an OCD/ERP therapist?