This is long but I’m hurting and need practical advice on what to do. My OCD is convincing me I’m psychotic. It doesn’t help that I was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and had an ill informed therapist tell me for 8 months that my intrusive thoughts were hallucinations and delusions. I just quit lithium a week ago after being on it for 4 months after a psychiatric nurse who I no longer am seeing told me it was safe to do so. I don’t exactly trust her though since she accused me of being a liar, impulsive, having a personality disorder, and told me I had to take antipsychotics or she would walk away, when I had legitimate questions about the bipolar diagnosis (hence no longer being in her care). My anxiety and intrusive thoughts are spiking worse than ever. My main theme is harm so I’m terrified of becoming manic and psychotic and believing my intrusive thoughts are correct, even though my non-OCD self is positive I’m not bipolar. I’m starting to doubt I have OCD and am asking myself what if I am actually delusional and in denial about my situation and am actually a danger to myself and others. I got approved for a PHP in the OCD and anxiety disorder program at Rogers but I don’t start for another 3 weeks. Has anyone been through anything like this (misdiagnosis, wrong medication making you worse, lithium withdrawal, questioning if your OCD is actually psychosis, etc) and has some advice with how to deal with this? I’m feeling so hopeless and dejected after being tossed around the mental health field like this only to find out I have OCD and could have started treatment 8 months ago and not gotten to this point if my doctors were more aware of this condition

Please help a struggling person This is going to be long and i apologize. Since about 11 I’ve been treated for bipolar disorder and no antipsychotics ever had any effect on me. All made me feel lucid or zombie like. Recently a psychiatrist diagnosed me with ocd and adhd and told me that the two illnesses together can present as bipolar disorder and that’s probably why i was misdiagnosed the majority of my life. I’ve come at a cross roads in my life. I desperately need help but only see my psychiatrist once a month which doesn’t really help. I’m not really a therapy person either. Can someone please help me out and tell me if I’m crazy or if they’ve had similar experiences?? My freshman year i had a 4.0 and was excited at the thought of becoming a med student in the future. Now that it’s summer I’m spiraling. I’m so angry all the time. I won’t let anyone see me or talk to anyone. Im so afraid I’m not good enough and my thoughts consume me. Im constantly worried about the future and have vivid day dreaming episodes of where I’ll end up and how I’m going to fail. I won’t go out and have gained weight and now i constant obsess about my weight and won’t let anyone see me because of what i look like. My thoughts are in patterns and repeat and repeat and won’t go away. I can’t even function anymore. All i do is lay in my bed and think. It’s like a bad movie that won’t turn off. I also won’t allow myself to experience any sort of love connection because I’m terrified of confirming or denying my sexuality. My brain is constant and i feel like there’s nothing that i can do to ever turn it off and feel normal. My intrusive thoughts and starting to become my only thoughts. This panic state has been my state for about 3 weeks now. Can someone give some advice?

I don’t normally make posts like this but if anyone can relate or has advice so I don’t feel so alone I would appreciate it! I feel like crying and I’m so anxious. So I’ve been dealing with an ocd flare up since February. It started out as contamination and harm after I had a really bad experience on a edible. The contamination mostly centered around the fear of someone accidentally giving me an edible to someone putting it in my food or water. Then it went from there to my Brian going you know what’s worse than edibles? LSD. So then I obsessed over that and it’s been like that on and off. I’ve had an extremely hard time with it it’s been one of the worst themes I ever had. I don’t eat certain things. Especially sweets. I avoid them. I avoid taking medication Bc I’m scared. I limit myself. I’m horrible about opening water bottles and if it doesn’t open just right I won’t drink out of it. I know it’s crazy I know it’s untrue but the panic I feel traces back to that night. I don’t ever want to feel that out of control again it scared me so bad I got diagnosed with ptsd (to be fair I had a lot of unresolved trauma that caused my glass to overfill) well, I’ve been going to EMDR therapy it’s got my ptsd under control but the ocd is louder. My ocd is clawing to stay alive. I’ve started to have intrusive thoughts now about my boyfriend might slip something into my water even though ITS NOT TRUE. So then I panic because the thoughts are so irrational that I get scared like why would I ever think that about him???? But the intrusive thoughts are so jarring and I don’t want my ocd to focus on him now! I need advice! I’ve been prescribed pristiq but haven’t taken it Bc you guessed it.,.. I’m scared to! I can’t go on like this! The thoughts are so irrational it scares me even though the rational side of me knows it’s not true but I guess that’s ocd. We get scared of the thoughts even though we know it’s not true and I know it’s my brain trying to keep the ocd going. I know therapy must be working otherwise my theme subjects wouldn’t have changed so fast. I’m so tired of this.

Hey everyone. This is my first post here and it’s probably going to be a long one because I guess I feel comfortable enough to be open here. I need help. When I first got diagnosed with OCD, I figured it only impacted a small part of my life. I thought I was only affected with compulsions and obsessions that dealt with contamination, tangible perfectionism and the obvious intrusive thoughts and that’s it. Well, I’ve come to realize that most of my thinking has been impacted by OCD. At this point the only way to describe how it feels to me is a forest of thorny vines growing in place of my mind or maybe through and around my brain constantly growing every-time I give into this type of thinking (which is basically all the time because I wasn’t aware this was OCD). I’ve definitely felt it more recently, but I know it’s always been there from what I recall from past memories. I got diagnosed not so long ago with OCD and I was happy to because it explained this thing I knew was wrong with me but I didn’t know how much it will and has impacted me in the past. So, I think I’ve created a matrix in my mind or strengthened the OCD thought patterns because now I feel like my OCD impacts everything I do. And I guess I’m saying I need help here because maybe you guys will be able to see it, maybe validate me and point me where I can get help. I’ve been telling the people around me, I think my thinking is disordered and I need help but I don’t think they really understand the amount it’s affecting me or grasp what I meant when I say “I Need Help”. I did have a therapist before but because of a insurance change, she can’t work with me anymore and I’m not sure when I’ll get another (just to clarify). Back to the matter, the past couple of months I’ve been in my head just thinking and thinking. About everything. To the point where my head starts to hurt or until I feel sick of thinking about it but I can’t. I find that’s my obsessions and compulsions (other than the need for order [which can also be mental]) are very mentally based and I find myself ashamed of them so I hide them so maybe that’s why the people around me don’t feel my need for getting help as much as I do. Anyways, examples of this have been, -constantly thinking about what’s the purpose of all of life and the hidden messages in life -feeling like if I don’t do everything perfectly then what the point or being very mad at myself -being obsessed with how I present to the rest of the world sometimes even in close relationships -having calculated movements and actions (having to move my body a certain way or it doesn’t feel right) -obsessing over an absolute truth -questioning friendships and other relationships - obsessing over achievements or failures -obsessing over people -obsessing over decisions and outcomes because I want to make the perfect decisions I could go on and on but basically it’s just a lot of thinking and ruminating and obsessing to the point where people tell me I look like I’m some where else all the time. And I’ve started to feel like I find comfort in it now. I’m also diagnosed with depression and anxiety and I feel like it’s all just OCD. And same goes for my dissociation. I feel like they all root from my OCD. I’m so tired of feeling like this all the time and without my therapist I feel like I’m stuck here. I can’t make decisions, I’m never present, I can’t make or keep friendships/ relationships, everything impacts me deeply because I create a emotional obsession to it, I can’t just be without questioning everything and I’m constantly in my head. I’ve also started getting high all the time because I feel like it’s the only way to escape my brain but I’ve felt like it’s getting out of hand. I’m starting to lose in any type of hope of getting better. Does anyone have an advice for working on OCD by yourself or identifying when it’s OCD (especially mental obsessions and compulsions) so I can start to chip at this boulder that’s weighing down my life and energy?