OCD - MEDS - IMPOTENCE - STIGMA

The response to me sharing that my OCD had flared up again and floored me over Christmas was met with an unprecedented outpouring of support from my family, friends, colleagues and LinkedIn network (thank you so much everyone), and it got me thinking about stigma and whether or not it is as present as I thought it was.

Message after message and call after call containing expressions of support and compassion have helped me dig in to get things under control, and whilst I’m not there yet, I am making incremental progress. I have also found myself questioning if the world still views mental ill health as a weakness, or something to be ashamed of. For me, my world is telling me it’s not and the way I have been supported and treated is the same as if I had presented with any other serious illness. So good news in my bubble.

But I did do a bit of an about turn in my thinking when I embarked on doing something I have always feared, both from a stigma and personal impact perspective. And that was taking medication for my OCD if it ever flared up again.

When I took an SRI 20+ years ago during another difficult OCD period it made me feel like I was living my life outside of my body and rendered me temporarily impotent. Not at all good for a previously fun loving mid-20 year old, so I stopped taking it and decided that meds were just not for me.

However, this current bout of OCD is particularly powerful, brought on I think by the continued disruption to my life and underlying uncertainty of the Pandemic, so I spoke with my CBT counsellor about combining the work I was doing with him with meds.

He suggested most of his clients came to him after they had found medication to be unsuccessful, but their ultimate progress could be explained by combining both, so he was quite positive on balance. So I did speak to my Doctor and he prescribed me a different SRI this time, which is in essence Prozac.

That word for some reason sends shivers down my spine. For me I have always associated Prozac with hospitalisation, but I gave myself a good talking to and came to the conclusion that this was my interpretation and not necessarily the worlds. Maybe, again, this was self-stigma!

So I spoke to a few people about it and guess what? The same response as when I opened up about Christmas, lots of love, support, personal experience with meds and not a jot of anything that could be described as stigma.

So I sit here writing this wanting to apologise to the world that I thought it would stigmatise me for being mentally ill and taking Prozac to compliment the CBT I was having, when in fact, in my world, it was all self-stigma.

I’m not saying stigma doesn’t exists because I know so many amazing people working hard to smash stigma, I’m just saying maybe they / we are making great strides, and in some cases, like mine, my world has progressed and it was my thoughts not theirs.

I’ve been combining CBT, with the meds for three weeks now, plus my counsellor has just introduced me to Compassion Focused Therapy, which I believe is a game changer and maybe a subject of a future post as I put it into practice and hopefully continue to make progress.

As I said, I’m not fully there and I’m needing to work extremely hard to manage my condition to get it back under control, but I’m doing everything I can and I know I will prevail. And it's comforting to know that there’s no apparent external stigma in my life.

Thank you ‘My World’ stay tuned ??

#ocd #mentalillness #hiddendisability #stigma #mentalhealth #cbt #antidepressants #prozac #anxiety