All About Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Did you just come back from checking if your home door was completely locked? Are you worried that it is still not locked enough and you will be going again to check it? Do you wash your hands too many times a day, even when you don’t need to because you feel they are not clean enough, or fear that you will get an infection? How about your bedroom lights? Why would you turn them back on and then off again when you already saw them turned off? If these symptoms sound familiar to you, then you are suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder.

Obsession Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder in which a person develops certain types of unreasonable thoughts, fears,  or worries toward something and feels the need to repeat certain types of actions in order to relief the anxiety. 

Obsessive compulsive disorder can provoke laughter in a skit on a television show, but for most people I will be anything but funny.  An obsession can vary from something as slightly irritating as checking to make sure the back door is locked 20 times a day to not being able to walk more than two miles from your home before you come back just to make sure you did not leave the stove on.  Even though you already checked it before you got in your car and checked it again after you get in, you still feel the need to go again to verify after you’re getting ready to start your car. 

Even though many people will consider it a mental illness, the fact is that there is physiological condition which is connected to the disorder.  Obsessive compulsive disorder is the consequence of a chemical imbalance in the person’s brain.   Particularly, the imbalance takes place in a fraction of the brain known as the caudate nucleus.  The caudate nucleus functions in conjunction with a region in the brain called the orbital cortex.  The orbital cortex is kind of like the tattletale of the brain; its function is to notify us if something is not going well, that we forget to lock the door or turn off the stove.  But when this imbalance takes place in the caudate nucleus it causes the orbital cortex to malfunction.  Naturally, it turns into a tattletale that keeps repeating the same story all over again.  It keeps advising you that the door is unlocked or that your hands are not clean and have to be washed. 

While certain drugs, such as Anafranil and Venlafaxine, have shown to be helpful in some cases when dealing with this imbalance, as of now there is still no proven foolproof pharmacological cure for obsessive compulsive disorder.  There isn’t still a cure yet, but it’s not all bad news.  An increasing amount of sufferers are getting great relief by combining one of the numerous brand name antidepressants with behavioral control techniques.   

A theory goes that the medication decreases a person’s anxiety level enough to allow for superior mental control over the fear associated with the compulsive.  After all, what is really happening is the fear that you left the door unlocked or the stove still burning.  Since the brain is constantly sending you these messages, it becomes very hard to resist the urge to check it out.  However, the medication can help by attempting to decrease that anxiety and allow you take more control over whether you check that door for the third time in fifteen minutes.