(tw?: brief mention of quarantine ig) I still don't know if I have OCD or if I'm making it up lol but I do have an ADHD diagnosis and uh, I started getting symptoms that looked like OCD when I started taking stimulant meds. I have intrusive thoughts about mental health a lot, like I'll get a symptom I can't immediatly explain with ADHD and I'll go "oh it’s probably this disorder or this other one" and I won't be able to shake the thought away (which is definetly an ADHD thing) but the more I try to ignore it the more anxiety it gives me "I NEED to know NOW! I need to look it up!!" and I end up researching these disorders for hours and hours, it usually interrupts my homework time (since I'll be on my computer and it's easy to say "I can open another tab and look it up really quick and then I can keep doing my hw", but I never actually go back to my hw). While "just right" OCD symptoms fit me best out of all the subtypes I've seen, the mental health research thing is by far the most time consuming "compulsion" (idk if they actually are compulsions since I still don't know if I have OCD yet) since it usually takes 4 hours or more and I do it almost every time I touch the computer (read: every time I try to do homework hhhhhhh) and I get very anxious and irritable when I get interrupted. But even though I've read a lot about these conditions that have triggered this "but wHAT IF" kind of anxiety and every time I do I reach a conclusion "no I don't have it/oh yeah this is definetly me", I keep going back to it and reaching different conclusions every time. It happened with ADHD (which helped get me diagnosed), it happened (and still kinda does) with ASD, depression, anxiety and now it's OCD... I do really want to talk about this with my psychiatrist, but I can't see her during quarantine (for obvious reasons) and I don't know of any way to contact her outside of my appointments which just leaves me guessing and makes everything worse (but also my psych doesn’t seem to believe me a lot when I bring things up to her and the first thing she said to me on our first appointment when I told her I had diagnosed ADHD (another doctor dxd me) was "but you seem really fine to me" so idk, I'm hesistant haha). Oh no that's a big paragraph haha (sorry) basically what I wanted to ask is: Is mental health a common obsession? Does what I described sound like an obsession? (Thanks for your time and for reading aaaaa)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Date posted: 5y

OCD can latch on to ANY THING. you don’t have to fit a certain sub type. as an unqualified stranger on the internet i can’t actually diagnose you haha, but the “research” you do definitely seems to be feeding into the anxiety like a compulsion. i’m going to paste the same comment i made on another post about ADHD: according to my therapist there’s a lot of cross over symptoms between OCD, ADHD, and ASD. i wouldn’t get too caught up in trying to figure out or “prove” if you have OCD or not (which seems to be a common OCD trait in itself). if you relate to OCD experiences and feel like you could benefit from therapies related to it (like ERP) there’s no harm bringing the possibility up. the only thing you might want to be concerned about is if you’re taking any medication, because from personal experience what helps one disorder might make the other worse. good luck man.

HolaLate

Date posted: 5y

Thanks, yeah the meds are definetly making the symptoms worse but I'll keep taking them bc I still need to document everything they do to me bc my psych will ask about it on our next appointment (hopefully soon). But seriously thanks for taking the time to write a response, it was really helpful :)

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