Re: severe obsessive compulsive disorder

Violin. You have plenty of reason for hope. Hang in there! Meanwhile, consider trying to wean off the meds and wean onto better food habits that feed the stomach which ultimately helps to feed your mind. It wouldn't hurt to wean away from tv too. Just the act of unplugging the TV February 05 has caused a lot of my mystery stresses and quirky illnesses to disappear.

I've never been diagnosed (thank God) with OCD, nor has there ever been a reason even close to an incident that provoked anybody (like parents or teachers when young, or myself since moving since getting older) to suggest or demand a diagnosis. However, my own observations of myself convince me I have some O/C tendencies, especially fidgety types.....where this may put me (or you, for this matter) on the supposed official scale of how/where establishment formally decrees somebody as OCD, I don't know, nor do I really care all that much.

Over time I have come to suspect that your average person - both healthy and not, probably exhibits a degree of O/C thoughts, and depending how each person has become conditioned to handle their thoughts, these may lead to some quirky behavior. Your giving witness to the horrible & unspeakable thoughts experienced is what really clued me in; I can relate, occasionally have these, don't know why, but they go way back to when I was very young, back when I also regularly had nasty nightmaress/dreams difficult to wake from. Over a long period I've come think of these as more a matter of how my mind has become conditioned to function in certain ways, and how it decides to obsess or not obsess on any particular thoughts and thought processes. I think these kinds of thoughts can also be classified as what other people call "racing thoughts". Your mention of stress indicators is also something that matches my own experiences. Symptoms of stress are also connected to thought behavior, especially subtle thought processes.

Several years back when I was still mostly plugged into mainstream, I was somewhat starting to succomb to my personal stresses (IE> how I allowed things / events / thoughts to mount and erupt). This period also included other mainstream-diagnosed conditions, namely GERD. After about 4 years of seeing the same HMO doctor for this overall "condition", one day he was out and the "new guy" assessed me for about 5 minutes then prescribed what he called a "mild anti-depressant" to take each night before sleep. After two nights, I threw these pills away, having noticed immediately how this "drug" seemed to make my problems of racing, disturbing thoughts, much more prominent and worse. Yeah, it shook my up a little, but over time I've gotten over it. This was sort of one of the major beginning events that finally helped me to wake up enough to start seeing and smelling the corruption and illusion of the world we have been raised in. Later I found out this drug was a derivative (generic) of the same well known & popular anti-depressent being widely and regularly prescribed to the nation at large at that time (about 7 years ago, but the brand name escapes me right now) that also seemed to be causing a widespread path of destruction, many uers having experienced horrible/weird/bizarre thoughts THAT THEY THEN ACTED ON, commiting all kinds of horrible acts. I think the pharmas have since relabeled that drug in an effort to continue pushing it while slinking and slithering away from the bad press.

Try for a moment to think of yourself as just a regular good-hearted person. Try to ignore for a moment how the establishment has labeled you with a history of their medical diagnosis (OCD). Regular good-hearted people have occasional unsound thoughts, some more than others, why, I dunno. It happens. Where this becomes a real problem for you AND others is if/when you start to act on these unsound thoughts, especially the worst of them. Look around our world and it becomes clear that it has become routine (I shudder to use the word "normal") that we have lots of people regularly acting on unsound thoughts. Some of them, we are told, end up in jail or psych wards, some of them get promoted to a higher office.

There are ways to train and improve some of the ways your mind operate, especially habitual thinking processes. Think calm, stay rational about the situation whenever you have these periods of bad thoughts. Somebody else once told me how they have learned to observe some of their own thoughts during which they begin to question themselves why it is they think they may be having whatever thoughts they do. I've tried this. It helps. This slows the mind at times when it may be helpful for it to slow down a bit. It has also allowed me to realize that even thought I still don't know why such thoughts occur to me, I do know that I really do not want to act on these thoughts. This has also helped to strengthen my inner resolve to keep these thoughts right where need to stay - in my head, rather than manifesting into external actions.

Good luck! Hang in there.