Ocd Essay

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a mental health disorder which involves performing compulsions in response to certain obsessions.
The obsessions are persistent and constant thoughts, images or ideas that keep running through a person’s mind, even though they are meaningless and unwanted. Most of the time, these obsessions focus on unpleasant or unnerving themes. Common obsessions are the person may fear becoming dirty or contaminated, having an uncontrollable impulse to hurt or kill a loved one, or fear that a fire, car accident, or other disaster will occur.
Compulsions are certain behaviours, called rituals that are performed because they lessen the anxiety created by the obsessions in OCD.
Common rituals related to fears of

It is believed that the obsessions and compulsions begin in the early stages of childhood. Laura, a girl whose case study was reported on in the book “Compulsive Behavior”, needed to count to 50 between each word she read or wrote. She had had OCD from the age of seven. After watching a science-fiction movie at the age of eight, she was convinced that her ritual was a way in which Martians were using her to make contact with Earth. According to American psychologist Dr. Rapoport, a number or other patients whose OCD began during childhood also believed their OCD had scientific purposes and was being controlled from outer space, because it was the only understandable reason they could find. This is similar to the medieval theory of rituals and obsessions resulting from “being possessed by the devil”. However, the development of modern psychology has shifted the quest for the cause of the rituals from the external world to factors inside the OCD

There is some evidence that people raised in religions that have many strict ritualistic practices may be more prone to developing OCD. Another example of OCD developing due to childhood experience is a child going through a traumatic event, such as having their house broken into and their things stolen. The child may then perform an act, such as saying a prayer or checking doors or windows, which is intended to relieve anxiety or fear. If these acts are successful in relieving anxiety then they are more likely to be repeated and become reinforced. Gradually, these acts become firmly established as compulsions.
One other theory about the origin of OCD is a chemical imbalance in the brain. In the 1970’s, it was discovered that clomipramine, a drug used to treat depression, in most cases, reduced the symptoms of OCD. There the theory was formed- if a drug which is a chemical substance affects the functioning of the brain, can relieve the effects of a disorder, it tells that the disorder must come from something wrong with the brain chemistry in the first