The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing

919 Words2 Pages

In the book "The boy who couldn't stop washing" by Judith L. Rapoport, M.D., the narrator, Rapoport, deals with hundreds of mentally disturbed children and adults who suffer of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Rapoport describes the intricacies of the disease and its treatments as well as the fact that the cause is unknown but there are many probable theories. Victims of this horrible disease are plagued with overwhelming thoughts of insecurity that tear apart their lives and haunt them, increasingly, over their lifetimes. Rapoport while learning about OCD, herself, learned how to treat each one with many different psychological perspectives including: biological, behavioral, and psychodynamic contributions. A story on ABC's 20/20 about OCD brought Rapoport's new study on the disease to the light, resulting in thousands of calls to her office daily from desperate OCD sufferers. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a disease that afflicts up to six million Americans, however all its characteristics are yet to be fully understood. Its causes, triggers, attributes, and variations are still unknown although effective medicines exist to treat the symptoms. OCD is a very peculiar disease as Rapoport discusses it comes in many different forms and have different symptoms yet have many similarities. One sure aspect is that it appears, or at least its symptoms do, out of the blue and is triggered either by stressful experiences or, most of the time, just appears out of nowhere. One example is a boy who's father was hard on him for being affected by the worlds "modern ways", the boy at a high school party tries LSD ( a hallucinatory drug), after that thoughts of whether his mind was dangerously affected by the drug. What seemed like completely appropriate worrying and anxiety turned into attacks of anxiety, he couldn't shake the thoughts that something was wrong with his mind. Essentially he had "his mind on his mind" constantly and that haunted his days his thought were as follows: " did the lsd do anything to my mind? The thought never went away ; instead it got more and more complicated. There must be something wrong with my mind if i am spending so much time worrying about it. Is there something wrong with my mind? Was this from the lsd? Will it ever get better?" (The boy who, J. L. Rapoport 125,126) Dr. Rapoport promptly put him on Anafranil (an anti-depressant, used for OCD, not marketed in the U.

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