How do I know when it’s time to call a crisis line? Or seek help? Has anybody actually been hospitalized for OCD? I’ve been crying everyday and I can’t stop worrying about everything and looking up stuff online and reading for hours a day about everything I think about. When I read things that confirm my suspicions I freak out and start shaking a little or jerking. But if I read things that confirm that I’m going to be okay, I start thinking of every single reason why it’s not going to be okay, and how could you ever think it’s going to be okay. I am not managing my life very well. I feel guilty about everything. I keep telling myself that I don’t deserve happiness and I don’t deserve food or nice things and I feel incredibly guilty every time I do something for myself like make food and I convince myself that it means I am the worst person and eating food when others can’t or don’t have food. And then I get sick and nauseous and anxious. I constantly have worries about my health and I’m constantly reading stuff online. I think I have schizophrenia sometimes cause of the voices I hear something when I’m stressed. So I spend so much time on forums looking for people who have disorder and comparing my experiences to theirs and then I keep thinking I’m faking symptoms for attention and can just stop doing things but then I do them again and I hate it. I am having a ton of false memories about what is real. I feel like the world is floaty and unreal. I just want this to stop.

I’ve never been diagnosed with OCD, but I relate so much to what people here are going through. I used to think it was just anxiety, and I felt like I could handle that. But lately I’ve been spiraling—constantly afraid that what I’m feeling is something worse, like psychosis or losing control of my mind. I feel so detached and scared, and I just want peace again. I have anxiety doing the smallest things, like the thought of waking up everyday and even eating give me straight up panic. I am afraid all the time, it’s paralyzing. And a lot of people say someone with psychosis wouldn’t worry that they’re in it, but then I convince myself I’ve been in it this whole time, and haven’t known, and that maybe I’ve been doing weird stuff. Idk. I also get really scared of labels. Even the idea of OCD makes me feel like I’ll never get better or like I’ll be stuck like this forever. I just want to be okay. If anyone has felt this way—confused, overwhelmed, or scared of what’s happening in their mind—I’d really appreciate any support or encouragement.

When is ocd so bad that someone can’t deal with it on their own? I honestly don’t know if it’s just my brain telling me I can’t deal with it when I really can, but then I start thinking if I tell myself I can deal with it when I really can’t, then I’ll actually loose it. In my mind, my safe haven has been remembering that I can always go to the hospital if I feel so bad. Because I’m so terrified of getting stress induced psychosis because of this extensive fear. I finally start to feel better and then my mind tells me that I have to worry about it to prevent it from happening. Each hour feels draining to get through and I’m terrified of each thoughts possibility that I know I’d feel better if I was hospitalized and kept away from doing potential harm. I go to therapy every other week but I feel like I need every week and actually more than once a week because each day feels hard to get through and it takes forever to get to therapy.

I would really appreciate it so much if someone took the time to read this and help me. I don’t know what to do anymore. I haven’t posted here in awhile. I had my OCD managed pretty decently for a year or so on medication, but I had to stop taking it, and after around 3-4 months, the OCD has become unbearable again. It used to be much more surrounding existential themes, eating, and others, not really real event/false memory stuff. But now it’s gotten really out of hand and I don’t know how to do it anymore. It’s surrounding a time of my life a long time ago. It was a dark time. I wasn’t myself and I was going through a lot of things, and I did a lot of things I regret. I self-destructed, embarrassed myself, and wasn’t good to the people around me. I was able to get my mind off of it for a long time, even though I would still think about it a good amount. I was able to be in the present, at least moreso than now. But now that I’m off medication, the guilt has become my obsession again. I can’t move on. I can’t do anything without thinking about all of these memories. I’m obsessed. I’ve started hating myself again, so much so that it’s hard to do anything anymore or believe I deserve anything good. The people around me tell me it wasn’t even that bad, but to me it was. To me, I failed myself, lost myself, and failed everyone around me. I can’t stop thinking about every person I said something wrong to or every time I screwed up. I’ve now started to convince myself I did terrible things I can’t remember, and that my mind just can’t deal with it. And that’s why I feel so guilty. There’s nothing to really support this though. But I’m starting to really convince myself that’s true. I’m trying not to listen to it, because I’ve convinced myself I have hit people with my car before and haven’t remembered when I absolutely didn’t and I know I never have. I drive back over and over to check there’s no one, even though I never heard any bang or felt myself anything. I can convince myself of some crazy false memories. So I know that I shouldn’t listen. But it’s hard not to when I have this guilt gnawing at me constantly. I come to conclusions that this guilt must be because I did something terrible that I don’t remember, even though I already think the things I remember were bad enough. But I would know by now right? If I did something bad I don’t remember? I don’t feel like this all the time. But it’s a lot of the time. But maybe that should be reassuring, that I only start obsessing like this when I think to. The past haunts me though. And I can never be in the present. I’ve started to resort to some unhealthy behaviors to distract myself or help me work towards something. I am starting to hate myself so much and feel like there’s no way I’ll ever be able to get out of this loop. I feel like I just can’t do this anymore. Maybe I need to go back on medication. But I don’t know. I don’t really want to. But will I ever fix this without it? Why do I feel SO guilty, all of the time? I do all these things for people because I feel indebted to them, because I feel undeserving of everything. I feel awful about myself. I don’t know what to do. Does anyone else deal with this?