Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental health condition that affects many people in the country. People think of OCD as someone who needs all their books in a nice neat row, checks the front door is locked five times or needs everything on their desk in the right place. And indeed it is for some, but for people like Holly Moore, it was much more than some peculiar compulsions.
She always considered herself to have some level of anxiety. Things like not wanting to be too far from home or be out of her comfort zone.
But it wasn’t until intrusive thoughts began to take over her every waking moment she realised she couldn’t go on like this. In desperation, she called up a psychiatric hospital begging them to take her in as a live-in patient as she believed she was going mad, reports The Mirror.
The 45-year-old, from Wilmslow, Cheshire, was suffering from a type of OCD called Pure O, which stands for purely obsessional. Her condition, which she suffered with from 2005-2011, centred around terrifying thoughts rather than behaviours or rituals, where a person can trawl over every life event, thought, or conversation ever had to prove or disprove them.
She argues that despite it being common, OCD is still one of the most misunderstood mental disorders. While she doesn’t feel comfortable revealing what exactly went through her mind, she gives catastrophic and sinister examples someone with Pure O can experience, such as being 100 per cent convinced your family has died in a car crash if they haven’t returned home on time or that you could be capable of murdering them.
“If you’ve got OCD, it will probably sit on your mind 24/7,” Holly said. “It’s a bit like a functioning alcoholic.
“With OCD, it will be around subjects of harm, violence, it could be religious, sexual, just horrendous and they tend to be the opposite to the person’s personality. And that’s why they’re so terrifying.”
Holly threw herself into her day job as a distraction and from the outside, no one would suspect anything was wrong. And while she confided in a couple of friends and her parents, they didn’t understand the full extent of what she was experiencing.
“I thought I was going mad,” said Holly. She doesn’t know exactly what triggered her OCD, but believes it lay dormant for years.
After calling her GP, who instantly recognised it as OCD, she was referred to a psychiatric hospital – Priory Hospital Cheadle Royal. Her private healthcare with work meant she was able to pay for thousands of pounds worth of treatment including a mix of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), mindfulness and meditation, and then came exposure therapy.
But she found it too much to deal with and left. It got worse and worse over the following four years and she returned to the hospital in despair.
“It’s a lot of work to get well so I’d left them after a year because it just terrified me,” Holly recalled. “Then it got to a four-year mark and was just horrendous.
“I was tired, sad, exhausted and terrified – depression then set in. I actually phoned the Priory and was begging them to admit me. ‘I just want to come and live there – if I can’t get better I don’t know what I would do’.”
Specialist Dr Papageorgio carried out another assessment and signed her up for a weekly group therapy session where she heard other patients’ stories – which made her wake up to her own. She said: “When you hear somebody talk about their thoughts, which will be completely different to yours, but just as ridiculous – you can see that about somebody else, but you can’t see it about yourself.
“So the more you can hear these people and think ‘but that’s ridiculous. You wouldn’t do that,’ it clicks.” After months of group therapy, Holly felt ‘cured.’ By January 2011, Holly came off medication and says she remains OCD-free.
“I would say Dr Papageorgio saved my life,” she admitted. “I genuinely felt like I rewired my brain.”
Around three-quarters of a million people are thought to be living with severe, life-impacting and debilitating OCD in the UK. And one study suggests patients with OCD are 10 times more likely to commit suicide.
This is something Holly, who hoped one day to form her own charity for those with OCD, feels passionately about and recognises how privileged she has been with being able to access the right healthcare to treat her disorder. She went on: “I’m from a middle-class background… I went to a doctor, got into the private treatment straight away.
“I genuinely feel there will be a group of people, maybe working class, that don’t get access, even to the best NHS treatment, that if they don’t know what it is that they’ve got, I genuinely believe it’s probably lead to suicides. I think there’s a group of people that will never have been diagnosed.
“I don’t know what we can do about that, I guess it’s having more people talk. I wish I was brave enough to tell my full story… it’s about seeing more on the TV, in media, and just getting it out in the open really and educating people”.
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