Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is considered the highest expression of anxiety disorders, and already affects between 2-3% of the Spanish population in the same frequency in both men and women.
The essence of this disorder is obsessions or intrusions, i.e., repetitive and circular thoughts or images about oneself or a situation. It is then that the person develops a series of strategies to control or ignore the negative emotional impact, usually without success. These “strategies” are called rituals, more popularly known as “manias”. Rituals can be mental (counting, mental checking, rationalizing….) or behavioral (hand washing, repetitive touching).
When a person is affected by OCD, he or she is overwhelmed by both obsessions and manias. OCD can come to dominate the life of the individual and those who live with him, preventing him from working, concentrating or being distracted. Although there are no determinant causes for OCD, there are vulnerable factors such as perfectionism or the excessive release of serotonin in the brain and other organs.
Another essential part of the disorder is its high complexity, since the degree of severity is not the same in all patients, nor are the different types of symptoms. While two people may have obsessions about cleanliness, they do not necessarily externalize it in the same way.
Symptoms and treatment of OCD
The most common symptoms are, for example, the affected person’s need for things to occupy an exact place or the fear of others touching the objects or moving them; the fear of being dirty or sticky, causing an excessive behavior regarding personal or domestic hygiene; the fear that by thinking or saying something negative this will happen, the fear of losing control and having a behavior considered as violent or repugnant by the individual, among others.
Hypochondriac behaviors (obsessions characterized by the fear of having contracted a disease that generate body checks and frequent visits to medical centers), doubts about having done things properly (having been offensive, having sent an e-mail to the right person, having made the right decisions or having closed the gas or the door correctly) and the need to keep objects in case they are needed someday are other of the most frequent symptoms.
OCD is a chronic disease that can be cured if the sufferer learns to control it. The combination of pharmacological treatment (through serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and cognitive-behavioral psychological therapy is the most effective way to combat the disorder, reducing obsessive symptomatology by up to 60%.