Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

The mental abnormality Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder has been thought as through the years another chiche chapter in the book of mental malfunctions. However by experts it is considered to be a great risk to the lives of many more adults than people realize. It makes chaos out of everyday routines and puts extreme complication onto the simplest situations (NIMH 2). Understanding this mental illness requires one to know what the ailment is, why people have it, the different ways in which it affects people, how these various episodes are triggered, and the means by which this sickness is treated.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, commonly known as O.C.D., is classified as an anxiety disorder, in which a person has continuous thoughts that will not find their way out of the person's mind no matter how hard he or she tries to force them (OCF 1). These thoughts are called obsessions. When patients experience these, much anxiety is produced and they are forced to go through with physical actions which ease the level of anxiety (NIMH 2). These actions, called compulsions, are repetitive in nature and take up a lot of time in one's day, normally about an hour. Compulsions are mostly talked about as rituals, and usually are senseless and very stressful to the person with O.C.D. Patients place much thought into the reasons that they commit rituals and also the frequently pointless rationales of how they help satisfy the obsessions. When not on an obsessive run, patients realize and understand their obsessions and compulsions make no sense, however, once they are initiated, the persons have no way of stopping them (NIMH 2). Patients are against having these thoughts and committing these rituals, and when a patient tends to be concentrating on something else, there tend to be no occurrences (OCF 2). Symptoms of O.C.D. mostly surface prominently in adolescence and adulthood, and if left alone untreated can last through one's lifetime (NIMH 1).

The National Institute of Mental Health, otherwise known as N.I.M.H., is the "federal agency that supports research on the brain, mental health, and mental illnesses. It conducted a nation-wide survey in 1980 that uncovered the surprisingly high number of adults that were then diagnosed with O.C.D. Approximately one out of every fifty American adults has some form of the illness. It makes no difference of your race or sex, in that O.C.D. is found mostly equal among all people diagnosed with it (NIMH 2). O.C.D. usually lies unnoticed due to the fact that most people are embarrassed that they have a mental disorder, and are too insecure to confront anyone about their illness (NIMH 1).

There is no proven source of O.C.D. (OCF2 4) Nonetheless, research shows that it involves communication problems between the front part of the brain and deeper brain mass, from which information is linked my the chemical messenger serotonin (Osborn 8). Medications that effect the neurotransmitter serotonin are responded to positively by patients, leading scientists to believe that the cause of O.C.D. is related to insufficient levels of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is the chemical messenger used by the orbital cortex and the basal ganglia, parts of the brain (Valente 125). Scientists at N.I.M.H. use a device known as the position emission topography, or PET, that maps out electrical activity of nerves in the brain. Their findings show us that everyday brain patterns that are involved in everyday tasks differ from those of O.C.D. patients (NIMH 3).

The following are some different cases of O.C.D., and how they are set off. A case involving intense fear of being contaminated with dirt or germs is related to the compulsion of washing oneself ritualistically. Fear of having indirectly harmed a loved one leads to a strong felt need to protect that person, due to the level of paranoia the patient feels of an event causing harm will come to the person; the most common ritual associated with this is repeating actions that would insure the safety of the individual that has been pictured in a situation that was related to the harming of him/her. In a case involving intimate sexual thoughts or urges, the patient has uncontrollable outbursts of sexual desire; the corresponding compulsion to this is called "touching", and is shown when the patient grabs at or feels sexual regions of someone else's body or his/her own. The most severe of the compulsions for people with this case is rape. In religious and moral insecurity cases, the person's compulsion is counting objects; this is an example of a, what most normal people would consider, pointless action in relation to its obsession. Another example of this is the cases in which patients have "forbidden thoughts", such as mental depiction of violent killings, abnormal sexual intimacy, torture, etc., are calmed by ritualistic rearranging and ordering objects. A common case of O.C.D. involves a special need to have things "just that way" that a person wants them; saving and hoarding items and money are the routine compulsions that go with it. Sometimes patients with a certain type of O.C.D. can be confused with radically open people. These patients feel a great need to tell or confess their feelings or something they have done; common compulsions are usually having to tell someone everything little detail of a situation, and praying to confess when someone is not there or often randomly in public (OCF 1-2) (Osborn 38-51).

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder can be treated in a variety of ways, most result in a combination of treatments that work together to produce faster and more effective results (OCF2 2). First, however, patients need to thoroughly understand