On OCD and not looking away

 

I've been thinking a lot recently about how exposure to horrible events in real life might affect people with OCD. Not a day goes by at the moment when I'm not focused on the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. I don't want to take my eyes away from this. I don't want to be quiet about it on social media or just focus on the things in my life that I can control. A livestreamed genocide is something that affects every decent human being everywhere in the world. The fact that the government of my country has actively supported Israel's war crimes makes this feel even more urgent for me. Of course I wonder if thinking and reading and tweeting about the worst crimes imaginable, perpetrated by Israel on a daily basis, will make me more prone to OCD episodes. I don't know if there's a correlation between frequency of OCD obsessions and daily attention to troubling and awful world events. But it's certainly something that's been occupying my thoughts a lot.

My first major period of depression and despair caused by OCD coincided with the preparations for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I was at university and having regular obsessions (not that I could have identified them as such at the time) telling me I had raped and murdered people. I used reassurance and checking compulsions for short-term relief, but I reached a point where the compulsions weren't even providing any short-term relief. The lead-up to the invasion in March of 2003 was like a background narrative running parallel to my own internal battles. I was trying to continue with my Uni work as best I could when some days I couldn't get out of bed. My country was about to commit itself to something terrible and irreversible. I could only focus on getting through the day. I was trying to balance psychiatric treatment with Uni work amidst the effort of maintaining a pretence of feeling okay when I could. At that time it almost felt okay to be detached from world events because I needed all of my emotional energy for myself.  

There were days when the darkness eased just a little and I could get scraps of enjoyment from my every day life. At that time, real life was talk of WMD and weapons inspectors and UN resolutions. It was a strange and unsettling time, but for me it was far less unsettling than what was going on in my nineteen-year-old mind. I look back on that awful time (both for me personally and for the country at large) with a strange kind of nostalgia. This is because OCD was in control of mind and it prevented me from really experiencing anything beyond the obsessive thoughts in my head at that time. I wonder if anything real, no matter how awful and terrifying, is better than being controlled by untruths that come from our own minds.   

I write in my novel 'Myself am Hell' about my own inability to engage with reality because OCD was in full control of my mind. In the moments of light - the points when I wasn't completely occupied by the obsessions - I almost enjoyed reading about the seeming inevitability of the invasion of Iraq, as bizarre as that sounds to me now. This is because I was able to engage with something that wasn't directly connected to my own suffering and mental torment. Iraq was external. External was safe. Inside my mind was where Hell had been built. Is there a certain comfort in having the luxury of being able to turn away from world events, to offer a collective shrug of powerlessness? Over twenty years have passed since those dark days in 2003, and the words I'm writing sound selfish to me as I write them. But I'm just being honest about how I felt at the time. 

As I write this, I'm in a different mental place. I still experience OCD obsessions sometimes, as I always will. I know now that exposure to the discomfort caused by these thoughts is the key to managing them. Through exposure, and sitting with discomfort, the obsessions no longer have the power to turn my mind into a Hell. Nothing has changed about these strange thoughts of rape and murder, only my response to them has. And this is the crux of why I write about OCD, and why I featured a character with OCD in my debut novel: the more you know about OCD, the easier it is to manage the condition. The dark time I've been referring to was born of the fact that I didn't know what I was experiencing was OCD. I didn't know that the obsessions aren't a reflection of me or my character. I worried that they were exactly that. I didn't know back in 2003 that the compulsions apparently offering a route to reassurance are perhaps the most insidious and manipulative traps laid by the condition to trap us in the cycle of obsessions and compulsions. I didn't know then. I do know now. I believe that the more people know about the reality of OCD and its debilitating nature, the easier it will become for future generations of people with the condition to identify its symptoms early and prevent it from constructing that uniquely personal Hell in each of our minds. OCD thrives on our ignorance. It thrives on t-shirts that say, "I'm so OCD". It thrives on the mistaken view that "everyone's a bit OCD", or that having OCD means you like things to be neat and tidy. For people with OCD, the condition will flood that knowledge and information vacuum with the tantalising offer of compulsions. Simply seek reassurance or check, or wash your hands again, or avoid this room or that person. Simply do these things and the discomfort will go away. But the discomfort never goes away for long. I want the next nineteen-year-old facing OCD for the first time to know that these thoughts are meaningless obsessions that can be managed with the right treatment.    

Hell exists in the Middle East. It is a Hell created by Zionists with no regard for human life. Engagement with this part of real life is not a comfort to me now. Of course it isn't. That's fine. I believe it's the duty of every decent human being not to turn away from what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Not to prioritise our own mental wellbeing or even our sanity itself over what's happening to our fellow human beings as they are exterminated and starved in Gaza and the occupied territories. But to shout as loud as we can that humanity is under attack there from an evil force that is supported by western governments. If OCD exposure exercises teach us anything it's that comfort isn't always a desirable or healthy state. Compulsions offer the false promise of immediate relief from the pain and suffering caused by the obsessions. Exposure therapy teaches us to embrace the discomfort of the obsessions without using the compulsions. With OCD, relief from suffering comes from discomfort rather than taking the seemingly easy option offered by the condition. 

I don't know if there's a correlation between frequency of OCD obsessions and daily attention to troubling and awful world events. I don't know that, but I still won't look away. Whether it's Iraq or Palestine or Sudan, I do know there's no such thing as "none of my business", or "nothing to do with me". Those of us who live in western countries whose governments have supported Israel and failed to hold it to account for decades have a responsibility to do whatever we can to hold our governments to account and make them do the right thing. And never to look away.