Welcome to
the NOCD Community

Content warning especially for people of color - discussing intrusive thoughts and OCD features with racism-related content. —— I have both Tourette’s and OCD. My Tourette’s tics regularly include slurs - usually against minority groups I’m a part of (against trans people, dykes, women), but often with a side of slurs against groups I’m not a part of, which I repress as I don’t want them to come out and hurt those around me. Unfortunately, repressed tics tend to get stuck in my head as anxious energy and intrusive thoughts. Lately I’ve had a particularly nasty racial slur tic which I’m naturally unwilling to let out get stuck in my head and turn into an intrusive thought that’s pounding away at me all day. It comes with feelings of intense shame, of course, and also with thoughts like “I’m a monster,” “I’m a racist” - harm OCD, in other words. Fear of harming non-white people around me. I really want this word and its attendant harm OCD to leave me alone. Fortunately the harm fears haven’t taken very deep mental hold yet, but I’m concerned they could if this tic urge doesn’t go away. Obsessing over it will prevent it from going away - my Tourettes latches on to the random noise in my brain and makes some of it into tics. I’m constantly reminding myself that Tourettes tics are involuntary, that they aren’t expressions of what I really believe, that they’re not my fault and I shouldn’t be embarrassed of them. This one, however, is one of the most racially hurtful words in the English language, and because I can’t let it out - because I don’t want to hurt people with it - it’s turned into intrusive thoughts and harm OCD. I’m not sure how to release it from my mind. I’ve tried saying the hurtful word into a pillow in a room by myself where no one can hear it, so that I can release the tic and help it go away, but I’m so ashamed of saying the word even where no one can hear it - it makes me feel like I’m really going to hurt people. The one time I got up the nerve to try it, it felt so wrong, and doing it only once isn’t enough to release a tic that’s this intensely built up. This is a really dicey situation, and because a lot of my friends aren’t white, I don’t want to put them in the position of having to support me through it. I would really appreciate advice from people experienced with harm OCD and really shame-inducing OCD of any kind - POCD, et cetera. Thank you all for your understanding. It’s taken me some nerve to be able to write this post.

Hey everyone, my name is Stephen Smith and I’m the Founder and CEO of NOCD. I also have OCD, which is why I founded the platform. Specifically, I have “intrusive thoughts OCD”- relationship-based, sexual, and religious thoughts that made me at one point question many fundamental elements of my character. Although google searching for answers to my thoughts was my most noticeable compulsion, my compulsions were mainly mental, where I would reassure myself, mentally review past events, pray, and even check my body for different sensations. Since I didn’t suffer with the “standard symptoms”, I ended up getting misdiagnosed 5 times which caused me to get really severe, drop out of school, and become housebound. While housebound, I started searching my thoughts online which led me to realize that I had OCD. Then, when searching for evidence-based OCD treatment, I stumbled upon exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy. Although ERP is extremely effective (about 80% of people with OCD see a significant reduction in symptoms after going through treatment), there was only one therapist in my area who specialized in it. She had a 7 month wait list and charged $250 per session- making the care pretty much inaccessible for me. I got lucky though since my mom, who was desperate at the time to see me get better, found money from a family friend to pay for my treatment. She also called the clinician and begged her to get me off the waitlist. If it wasn’t for her, I probably wouldn’t be here today. After doing ERP with the provider for 12 weeks, I ended up getting better- so much to the point where I was able to go back to school, finish up my football career (I was a college quarterback) and eventually complete my degree. Because I managed the OCD fears by accepting the uncertainty behind them (a core principle behind response prevention), the anxiety over time went away, and the thoughts decreased in frequency as well as in severity (since they didn’t really matter to me anymore). After that happened, I ended up returning back to normal pretty much- feeling as good as I did before my severe OCD onset. That’s when I started pondering the question, “if OCD is so treatable with a good ERP therapist, then why isn’t treatment more accessible to people going through the condition?” It’s a question I’m sure many of you are currently asking or have asked before. Now to the good news....There is no more need to ask that question. Now inside of NOCD, you can do live, face-to-face therapy sessions with a licensed therapist who specializes in treating OCD using exposure and response prevention (ERP). After signing up, all you need to do is open up your phone or laptop and start the session with the ERP therapist. It’s all video-conferencing. It’s the solution that I always wanted when I was going through treatment, so I hope you can find value in it if you are suffering- especially those who are stuck on the waitlist or who live hours from care. Anyways- if you have questions about doing ERP therapy with a NOCD telehealth provider or with another therapist feel free to ask them here. I will definitely give you the pros and cons. Much love!

Hi Friends!My name is Raja Shanmugam.I am from India.I am suffering from OCD(Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) mixed type severe OCD with tricholottomania(Hair Pulling Disorder since 2012.Now my age is 24.I am suffering since I am 15.I suffered in silence with this also I have completed my graduation(Computer Science Engineering) passed in First Class with CGPA 8.0.After that I went to Job in IT there my OCD becomes very severe and I had panic attack daily. In workplace my obsession is to scold the HR Manager with bad words in whatsapp.I got anxious about this fake thought 24/7.The sleep was decreased.The compulsion i performed to overcome is I will be reading the managers three times each when i get that obsession of scolding the manager.The hair pulling disorder also increased.At the time my first month salary credited in my account then suddenly came the obsession that I am sending the money through paytm random strangers and I am emptying my bank account.The compulsion i performed during works I will count the payments apps like paytm,phonepe by looking into my phone during workhours each time when i get the obsession.Then finally i thought of finding the solution to this stupid disorder making the sufferer to suffer in silence.Its really a fucking disorder only the sufferer we knows its pain in daily life 24/7 fighting with our own mind.Then i resigned my job in IT.I paid rs:300 in practo consultation for psychiatrist and explained my problem in detail to him it was a online consultation because i think all of you know about the stupid stigma amoung people regarding mental illness.People will easily portrait and make fun by calling "Psycho", " Crazy" etc.Then the online doctor told me to visit the local psychiatrist doctor who is specialized in MD psychiatrist.Then after 10 years of suffering with this devil without knowing itself. First time i explained to my parents they were shocked and begin to cry loud and my mother fainted at that place since i am the only son for them they could not tolerate that I am suffering from Mental Illness. Then we visited the local psychiatrist in my district very kind doctor he appreaciated me saying that without knowing disorder itself he had completed his graduation in first class and he gifted me his favourite Parker Pen. Then he prescribed me the SSRI(Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) Flunil 60 mg after this i didnot sleep for 10 days i was admitted in his hospital he injected me lorazepam and clonazepam etc still nothing improved in my sleep. On the 11th day i woke up from my bed in hospital i pushed my parents and rushed to the doctor to take the private jet and go to the bangalore I am a car why i am here. The staff nurse and attenders were laughing at me i started to should loud and i started to talk nonsense irrelavant sentence to doctor. Then the doctor to my parents that my mind cannot tolerate SSRI and your son has a Mania Switch which is a condition of Bipolar Affective Disorder then doctor tied my hand and injected 10 mg lorazepan liquid form in the deltoid area arm. The doctor told my parents to take me to the NIMHANS Hospital Bangalore Asia's best Neuropsychiatric hospital. I was taken in my car with hands tied . Then NIMHANs started medication (Antipsychotics and Mood Stabilizer) For Bipolar Affective disorder i was in Mania for ten days after that my sleep improved my OCD is still at the same i stayed at NIMHANS for 55 days they gave Cognitive Behavioural therapy for hair pulling Tricholottomania and ERP(Exposure Response Therapy) for OCD. They prescribed also SSRI but in my case its been switched to Bipolar disorder so i have to take both. Then we shifted from our own house to city outerside villa since i am getting frequent panic attacks. We did not even inform to our relatives anybody due to that stupid stigma around the society and I have no friends also all my friends in my college days separated me after seeing the little little compulsions and hair pulling behavious. I am a single person in my family fighting with this mind fucking disorder 24/7.Friends my kind advice is Be Strong dont consider others they dont what we are suffering . Take medication regularly dont miss. Do yoga by simply closing eyes for half an hour. You all are my Friends. Stay Strong Stay Happy. If you want to connect with me in whatsapps means my whatsapp number:+91-8608657313.Thank You friends.

Been ruminating a lot on the fact that the groinal responses that I got that caused my OCD all happened with kids of the same gender, that’s been terrifying me lately. It’s making it feel more real ya know? That if it was just OCD/intrusive thoughts it would be gender specific. Have any of you guys had anything like this, where the same type of kid caused your OCD to start?

Anyone has email OCD? I constantly check emails and I fear that I might not see the notification so I open and check emails again and again and this happens entire day everyday

The constant thought I'm facing today is, what if I'm a bad person? Ughhhhh

Hi, I’ve been having intense anxiety today about past events. As a child I would have intense periods where I would obsess about bad things I did in the past and confess them all to my parents and sometimes to friends. I’m having another such period now, but I think the things I’ve done that I’m obsessing over now are absolutely horrid. I confessed a few such things to my mom a few months ago but there’s more things to confess now and I can’t tell if I’m a horrible, disgusting person or if I’m just obsessing and should keep things to myself, like they might pass soon. I think this is OCD but I’m feeling extremely anxious right now.

I’m so terrified of being called out as a disgusting person and I haven’t even done anything to my knowledge but I’m still terrified. I don’t find kids attractive at all! It disgusts me to even think about!! So why am I so scared? I’m scared of telling certain friends I’d trust about pocd and them thinking I’m a pedo. It’s terrifying.

This massive argument happened in a group I'm in with other people who have the same business as me, and all I cared about was for it to hurry up and end so I could focus on figuring out what I was ruminating over. I feel so detached from the rest of the world. Like they're actually living and feeling things in the real world, and I'm living in my head and feeling things in my head.

I have moral/responsibility OCD and I constantly feel the need to report things online where I feel someone may be going against the rules/regulations. Or something may be inappropriate/illegal (even if I'm not sure) I avoid most websites, mainly porn sites where I feel the likelyhood of coming across something like that is higher and gives me so much anxiety and fear. Anyway, because I dont feel comfortable going on an actual pornsite, I've been going on a erotic literature site (literotica) for ERP. Literotica states in all its stories the characters depicted are 18+. I was scrolling past the stories today and came across a title where there was an alice in wonderland themed story. I'm assuming the characters would be depicted 18+ otherwise it wouldnt have been allowed but the title creeped me out. I didnt click the story so I have no idea what was said in it. My brain is saying you should have reported it, just incase. But the whole point of ERP is not to do your compulsions. I cant stop ruminating on it though. I keep thinking I should go back and report it as I cant be sure all characters in the story were depicted as 18+? Ugh I've been ruminating on this for hours now.

i just did about 40mins of erp scrolling through tiktok watching bisexual videos and boy am i triggered. i noticed myself doing sneaky compulsions tho. for example: the tiktok was like “if you liked these characters when you were young then you’re definitely bisexual” and they’d show the characters for example prince eric and ariel and i remember when i was young how obsessed i was with prince eric like i wanted to full blown marry him and i’d always pretend i was ariel. so then my sneaky compulsion was “you see you’re straight you only liked eric” but this one tiktok almost made me cry and i freaked out because i was overthinking why i almost cried: it was this guy talking about how he was straight his whole life until 2016 where he wasn’t sure and now he’s bi and when i tell you my heart fell to my stomach i wanted to cry but i didn’t i just say with the anxiety the thing is i know you’re not suppose to stop until the anxiety goes down but my anxiety didn’t go down at all it’s rose a lot. like every tiktok i saw it just got higher and higher. am i doing something wrong?

I’m so tired of hocd bro I wonder what would happen if I experimented with a girl ( I have a bf I love him so much ) and I don’t wanna go that far just to know my sexuality but I honestly can’t take this anymore . Am I just in denial please help .

I’m in a call with a friend right now and I just feel so unsafe. Like something bad will happen to me because it always does. And I want to cry and breakdown but I can’t because my friend is on the phone with me. I’m just terrified and I feel so alone with this. I feel like I’m lying. I feel like an imposter. I’m scared that I’m not innocent and I’m paranoid as all hell and it won’t go away. I try to distract myself, tell myself it’s just thoughts, but then I get things recommended to me on YouTube about certain subjects and I just get triggered again. I feel I can’t talk to anyone about this either because my friends don’t understand. I feel like a burden. And I’m scared. My appointment isn’t until the 23rd and even then I don’t know if this therapist will know about ocd at all. I’m so scared I just miss how things used to be. I’m freaking out and it won’t stop. I’m scared I’m gonna get in trouble somehow someway. I’m scared of hurting people. I’m scared of being a bad person. I’m scared of my career being ruined. I’m scared of my life not having any meaning other than harming others. because between OCD and BPD that’s all it feels like. It feels like that’s my only purpose in life is to be bad. I’ve slowly begun learning that everyone makes mistakes and that a lot of us are so just grey. But because of everything in my life Especially with trauma and my crippling loneliness physically? And how people slowly leave me either through sickness and death or just can’t deal with my mentally ill brain anymore they all just leave. I don’t want to be a bad person, I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to go back in time to my childhood when things were ok again. I used to never have these horrible thoughts. Never. Then one day I did and it hasn’t ended since. I mean I’ve always had ocd. I used to get terrifying visual and textual thoughts In my head of harming people physically (I still can’t touch knives. It’s incredibly hard to be near them) but once something happened in my teen years and ever since then the pocd thoughts started and never went away. I’m constantly plagued by every single subtype of ocd and it drives me insane. One minute I’ll cry about pocd next I’ll cry about health ocd next it’ll be harm ocd. Last year the entire year I thought I was dying from cancer bc I kept having weird symptoms and my grandmother died from cancer and I literally cared for her up until her death bed and it was *traumatizing*. I am TRAUMATIZED from the 6 years of having to had take care of another human being with dementia. And now my mom has Alzheimer’s and it’s just happening all over again. I’ve also been scared because my memory is *so* bad and I mean BAD that I’m scared I’m gonna get dementia or Alzheimer’s like my grandma and mom. I’m scared I’m gonna get cancer like my grandma (and it’s possible in my future because I already have issues with my uterus with months long periods sometimes and my gyn said I might have the gene for ovarian cancer which is what my grandma died from) and I just?? I can’t do it. My future is planned out for me no matter how I look at it. Something bad will happen to me no matter what. I always just wanted to be a famous artist but even then I don’t think I can do that because I’m terrified I’m living a lie and deep down people will find deep dark secrets about me and say I’m this horrible person. Ok rant over.

I have an appointment with a therapist next week but it isn’t any specialized therapist so I’m just really hoping she knows about Ocd and subtypes of it. I feel I’m going insane. I’m paranoid as all hell and my YouTube recommended videos are triggering me and I’m scared people can see what I talk about or something and that’s why my YouTube recs are the way they are and my pocd is being triggered by them. I just want it all to go away.

Pedophile OCD is completely destroying my life or if I think it's that but if I had to say one image it would be this experience. I am 15 years old and as a teen I feel well I'm aware my hormones are all over the place. Recently I developed an obsession over reporting "MAPs" (as they call themselves on Twitter "Minor Attracted Person") because I'm a minor (15) and I want them all gone. I freaking hate them. Then after a while I was on a trip and freaked out over thinking a kid my brain might have thought he was cute because I don't knoe maybe for a split second I thought he looked older but then he stood up and I saw he was like seven and I knew I *definitely* didn't like him. I still was really conflicted over the fact that at first I did and was starting to freak out about this PRETTY HARD which ended up on me spending the whole trip worrying about if I could be a pedophile and it felt very real and I might have unconsiously liked him. This really really made me want to kill myself. I kept on freaking out about kids but always would calm down and see them normally I did stop reporting maps on Twitter because it was affecting me. I am aware I'm very sensitive so there's that too. I did went back to it after a while and saw something very disturbing. It was actually CP but I still went and reported it and scroll through it and I hated it. It was horrible. I forced myself to watch to be sure I didn't like any of that and there was one that grossed me out by and everything because it was like a really small girl and it broke my heart. But then a couple days pass and I was fantasizing about my boyfriend half asleep and the thought of being the guy in the video of that girl came up to my mind and I was half asleep so I only half realized it It was still the same speed I was imagining my boyfriend in and the image of the girl came and I half knew it (or I would had stopped the thought right there) was there and I thought about the size and the softness of the girl while in the disgusting fantasy and I felt turned on by it BUT I couldn't see her face and the "image" was very blurry so I don't know if it's PTSD from what I saw (which it has heavily affected me) or what because I think I might had related those specific characteristics as to stuff (like hentai, not lolis just they normally look smaller and they're soft I've always enjoyed tummy and like imagining my boyfriend's) I would jack off to and if I think about it that way it's still hot but when I remember the EXACT image I saw I'm just horrified again. And it's making me feel like a monster. Though if I think of the mix weird vision I think I still find it hot, it was very surreal and I'm a very horny teenager so I am losing my mind. My boyfriend has told me that at this age we just want to have sex with anything and everything and that soft and small = is something the teenage brain teen brain will want to have sex with. But I find this so abhorrent and I wouldn't even want to touch a child so I don't know what is going on. I can't think about anything else other than this. I also talked to my mom about it and she told me it's normal because I was fooled by this since it was something abhorrent yet presented to me in a sexual way related to stuff I find attractive and that I like soft and small stuff still because I'm still soft and even if I'm a 15yo my mind is still developing so???? Please, please I need to know if I'm normal. I'm about to turn 16 and I could be diagnosed with this horrible thing. I'm going to lose my mind. Please someone help me.

OK u have a problem like I have a thought and it was confused like I didn't know what was that and after I realized it was normal and I say like oh so this I can enjoy, so I don't enjoy the other ones just because the are wrong? And if I could I would enjoy them?

Can you have BPD and OCD at the same time

I just read an article from a bisexual person saying it’s very odd to be straight in 2020 because everyone tries different things. Now I feel like I’m strange and my hocd tells me that all my thoughts are true.

I used to see a lot of stuff online that said stuff along the lines of ‘you are not your thoughts, you have to differentiate OCD/intrusive thoughts from your values/beliefs/gut instincts’ (and this was reassurance to me sort of saying I wasn’t questioning my sexuality it was just OCD putting more value on random stuff) but I’ve also seen a lot that says it’s a compulsion/self reassurance to say to yourself ‘it’s only OCD’ when you get an intrusive thought. So I’m confused as to whether I should just be accepting uncertainty and shrugging at my intrusive thoughts and not saying ‘oh it’s ocd’ , but then that also makes me think well if I’m not sure whether it’s ocd then maybe my thoughts do have meaning? Does that make any sense? Would appreciate some help as to what mindset will help me heal the most going forward.

I dont understand. I try not to react to the thoughts, groinal responses and yet still they happen. How am I not meant to doubt myself And not believe that these thoughts are real when I'm not even fighting back and nothings improving