Compulsive

Why We Need To Keep Talking About Mental Health

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 12 Comments

Tomorrow is a very special day for this blog that you are oh so kindly reading in this moment (cheers for that), for tomorrow will mark the one year anniversary of Born Without Marbles being “a thing” on the internet as opposed to an idea in my head that I was too scared to carry out.
That means that I have been harping on about mental health, whether you have liked it or not, for an entire year, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people out there wondering why on earth I am still waffling on about illnesses that the majority of the population are well aware of by now.
Ok the general public may have misconceived ideas and perceptions as to what an illness may really be like, but everyone has a rough idea these days as to what things like OCD and Anorexia actually are, so why am I still talking about these things and why do I plan on continuing to talk about these things for the foreseeable future? Newton isn’t still harping on about the time that apple fell on his head (partly because Gravity is old news that doesn’t own the headlines these days and partly because he died in 1726 which somewhat limits his abilities to “harp on”), so why do I keep talking about what it is like to be mentally ill when the existence of mental illnesses is no longer breaking news. Well friends, whether you have been here from the beginning or whether this is your first experience of Born Without Marbles (Welcome. Please excuse the penguins I have left lying around in each post. They are kind of important), today I am going to answer that question and tell you why, even after a year of weekly waffling, I still feel that we all need to keep talking about mental health.

Of course there are all the obvious things like the fact that the more we talk about mental illness, the more research there will be and in turn the more likely we are to find a cure. To explain why I personally have such a passion for the subject however, I need to take you back to 2003, and, more specifically, eleven year old Katie (to set the scene I looked exactly the same as I do now only shorter).
As the name of this blog suggests, I can see that I have shown signs of mental illness from the moment I was born, but it was in 2003 that things really began to become a problem, that I became afraid and ashamed for the first time of the thoughts going on in my head. It was the first time that I didn’t feel normal, and feared that I was different from everyone else.

Every day at school I would watch other pupils in awe. I would see them eating school dinners, opening doors and shaking hands with each other as if it was the easiest thing in the world, and I would wonder how on earth they did it all. For some reason when I tried to open a door, I would find myself frozen in fear, unable to touch the handle as if someone was holding my arms behind my back. When I was in the queue for school dinners, my head was screaming at me to run away because I wasn’t allowed to eat, and no matter how hard I tried to concentrate in lessons about ox bow lakes, all I could see in my mind were images of terrible things happening to all the people I loved, and hear threats that the only way to stop those things happening was to repeat some kind of ritual. This would have been rubbish enough, but the worst bit was that I had no idea what this meant or why this was happening. I thought long and hard, trying to come up with an explanation but the whole thing made very little sense to me. What was so scary about the germs on a door handle when I had evidence all around me showing that nothing bad was happening to people “contaminated” with them? Why couldn’t I go to lunch, even on pasta days? Logically I knew that I loved pasta (pasta is flipping awesome), so why did the idea of eating a steaming bowlful topped with as much cheese as I could get away with before a disapproving dinner lady grasped my cheddar filled palm, scare me so much?
These things went on for months, and I said nothing to anyone because I was too afraid. Maybe mental health wasn’t as widely discussed in 2003 or maybe I was just unaware of what mental illnesses were, but I had never heard of anyone experiencing these things so I kept silent and hoped they would go away. Spoiler alert: they didn’t. Of all the awkward situations I found myself in however, there is one in particular that sticks in my mind and one that continues to motivate me and my dedication to this blog today.

“It” happened at the end of a music lesson. Now, in my school, music was taught in a separate building to all others, ditto art, drama, and DT who all had their own individual buildings (something tells me the staff members of the more creative subjects did not get on well…this explanation of the separate buildings certainly correlates with the time I saw the head of drama pelting the art teacher’s studio with water balloons anyway…)

On the day in which our story occurred, our class had been taken to a room on the top floor of the music building where there were a lot of computers and keyboards set up for us to spend a few hours learning how to play the theme tune from Titanic (a vital part to any eleven year old’s education). Then, the lesson ended and we were dismissed, a fact that meant we were going to have to leave the room and therefore, someone was going to have to open the door. Usually I was very good at avoiding such a responsibility, and at the end of every lesson I would fumble around with my bag until someone else had done the job so that I could scoot on after them without touching anything. This technique worked perfectly for every lesson, but today, for some reason, the teacher wanted us to lead out in single file from the nearest computer to the door. I think maybe someone had been messing about with a keyboard, playing Celine Dion’s soundtrack with a little too much gusto, so in the exit of the classroom, the teacher wanted to establish some serious authority. I felt sick. I was at the computer nearest the door. I was to be the first to leave, I was to lead my fellow students to freedom. I was to open the door. When I saw that it was a push door then, I was thrilled. Happily I nudged the door with my foot and led my classmates out, but the relief was short lived as I realised we were headed for another door, a pull one with a handle…AND AN EXIT CODE KEYPAD.
I thought about pausing in the corridor to let someone overtake but the corridor was too narrow, it was single file, there was no escape, and as I walked down the stair case to the door I genuinely felt like I was walking to the gallows. This was it. I was going to have to touch a door handle, and it was going to be the end of the world. When I reached the door I stopped. The time had come to raise my hand, but I couldn’t move. Instead, I just found myself stuck, panic building as the queue of students eager to go home started forming behind me. Luckily everyone was talking about the day too much to notice my embarrassing situation at first, but after a few minutes of standing in a line waiting, understandably, people started wondering what the hell was going on, and from the back of the line I heard a voice ask perfectly reasonably “is there something wrong with the door?” From then it went silent and all I could hear was the response in my head of “no actually, there is nothing wrong with the door, there is something wrong with me and I have no idea what it is”.

Eventually, after what felt like 34 years, the person behind me became impatient, reached around and opened the door, and from there I ran sobbing to the medical centre with shame, fear and embarrassment. I didn’t want to see anyone ever again, I had to hide, so I decided to take refuge in the sanitarium. When the nurse asked me what was wrong, I lied and told her that I had a tummy ache. I spent the rest of the day curled up on the sofa with a hot wheat bag watching episodes of the Simpsons, feeling more alone than I knew it was possible to feel. There were hundreds of other pupils in the school, but for some reason I was different, I couldn’t open doors or eat meals like they appeared to, and there was nobody, least of all me, who understood why.

It is for that Katie sitting on that sofa with that smelly hot wheat bag that I started this blog, and it is for all the smelly hot wheat bag holding people out there pretending to be fine, pretending to have tummy aches to cover up the fact they are terrified of their own minds and too scared to speak out for fear that other people won’t believe them, that I write this blog. Had I heard about mental health problems sooner, maybe I would have asked for support sooner, but what I would have found more helpful than any of the symptoms listed in the millions of health care packs, would have been the knowledge that there was at least someone out there who struggled with the same things, who let me know I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t alone. It is for that reason that, no matter how much awareness there is about the existence of mental illnesses, I will keep talking about my experiences with mental health problems in public spaces. This isn’t a blog to just give information, in my eyes, this blog is a friend, both to me, to the readers and to anyone out there who comments to say that they can relate to my problems and thus remind me once again that none of us are alone.

So happy birthday Born Without Marbles, and thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the support anyone reading this has ever provided. Here’s to another year, another 52 weeks of my ramblings, another 365 days of friendship.

Take care everyone x

MarblesBirthday

An Explanation Of Invisible OCD Rituals

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 10 Comments

When most people imagine someone with OCD carrying out a ritual, they probably picture them visually carrying the ritual out in the “real world”. Maybe some will picture a person repeatedly tapping a light switch, arranging books or washing their hands, but it is unlikely that the person pictured will simply be standing there with no obvious signs of ritualistic activity.
However, many people with OCD actually have rituals that can be carried out invisibly, and this is a side to OCD that I feel needs more discussion/awareness raised, partly to help others understand the condition better, but partly to help sufferers who do not realise that what they are experiencing is actually a form of OCD that can be treated.

Now I have started to write this blog post I have realised just how hard trying to explain a mental ritual is to people who may not have had them themselves (damn it past Katie why did you have this as an idea for a blog).
If trying to give a rough idea in terms of my OCD though, my personal thought rituals generally involve things like compulsively picturing certain events or people, thinking the same words a certain number of times, having to remember something in exact detail or ritualistic blinking (which I suppose isn’t really a thought ritual as if you know what I am doing you can physically see it, but in most circumstances people don’t notice and thus I count it as one of the lesser known invisible sides to the illness. Even when people do notice I am fairly good at covering it up anyway. You would not believe the number of times people have asked if I am ok because I am flapping my eyelids like the wings of a hummingbird and I have had to pretend I had an eyelash. I used to feel very bad saying this as I don’t like lying, but recently the guilt has gone as I realised that it isn’t actually a lie. It is indeed a true fact that I have eyelashes…just not in the specific eye location implied by my blinking…God this is a long set of brackets…sorry about that…I will close them now…actually wait…no it is ok that was all I had to say about blinking…today at least).

Some of these thought rituals mentioned above are fairly straightforward, as in the “repeating a certain thought over and over”. Okay it can take a long time but it is easy to understand and explain to professionals as a symptom. This is not however the case with all thought rituals, and in order to give some impression of just how complex they can become, I thought I would explain a specifically long and complicated one of mine (if you are able to follow this next bit and gain any sense from it then congratulations, you are a genius, please apply to Mensa immediately).

So, probably the most complex of my rituals is one that I carry out every night before I go to sleep in order to “keep my friends and family safe” (though I am of course aware that rationally there is no way that my thoughts prior to the land of nod are capable of such safeguarding. Nevertheless I still carry them out every evening without fail…GAH!)

The start of the ritual involves picturing a long mantlepiece (it is made of high quality mahogany in case you are interested), and it is lined with photo frames, each one containing the face of a loved one that I wish to protect. Over the years the photos of the people in these frames have changed as people have come and gone from my life, but it is rare that a picture is removed and more common for an extra one to randomly appear when someone becomes particularly special to me (bear in mind this is a very long mantlepiece that can hold an infinite number of frames. It is a nightmare to dust.)
Once all the pictures are imagined in their neat little line, the next step is to imagine a paintbrush with green paint on the end drawing a tick over the face of each person to confirm them as safe, much like an attendance sheet register thing that you have in school. What must not happen is that I picture a red cross being painted over each face. It sounds easy enough, after all they are my thoughts so surely I can think what I want (ha!), but it is very much like that trick when people ask you to imagine a scenario and not to imagine a white elephant, a statement after which you can think of little other than a trunked creature looming in the forefront of your mind. Once the green tick is imagined on the person’s face I then have to move on to the next picture and so on until all of the faces are adorned with a flourish of bright jade acrylic. However, if during this process one of the pictures goes wrong (aka they get a red cross), then I have to start the entire thing again from photo one. Even if I finally manage a line of perfect ticks though, the ritual is not over, as then I have to imagine staring at all these approved photographs for 100 counts without imagining a gust of wind blowing any of the pictures over which is incredibly stressful as if such a wind occurs I have to whip out the paint brush and start all over again. That little explanation from the painting of the green ticks is step ONE of this thought ritual.
There are ten steps overall. TEN.

Rest assured, I will not elaborate on the next nine steps as I fear I would be here all day. No matter what step I get to however, if there are any mistakes I am sent back to step one and hopefully this explains somewhat the difficulty, complexity and time consuming nature of rituals that may not be visible like those in which I wash my hands multiple times. I realise it probably sounds a bit weird to say that I get stressed and upset over imaginary breezes blowing imaginary photo frames off an imaginary mantlepiece, but if those breezes come and if those pictures fall then I fear I will put everyone I have ever loved in danger due to my negligence, an understandably scary thought for anyone.

You are probably wondering how on earth I concocted such ridiculously long mental routines, yet if you were to ask me how they appeared I honestly couldn’t tell you. They didn’t exactly appear overnight, rather they developed over time in a gradual process I cannot remember the beginning of. That said, if I had to pin the origin of my mental rituals it would probably be my first hospital admission to a psychiatric unit over ten years ago. With most people, OCD tends to evolve and morph over time as the person’s life and situation changes and it is often a dramatic change in environment or situation (like suddenly being inpatient in hospital), that can cause rituals to flick on stealth mode and turn invisible. Before my first hospital admission, all of my rituals were visible and involved things like showering for hours on end or repeatedly washing my hands. In hospital however, none of these rituals were possible as I was physically locked out of my bathroom and had to ask for permission each time I needed to use it, at which point I would be supervised and stopped from engaging in any behaviours. Now, on the surface, you would think this cured the problem. True, I was no longer showering for hours every day, but that wasn’t because I didn’t have OCD anymore, it was because I was physically incapable of getting to the shower despite best efforts (turns out I am rubbish at picking locks/kicking down doors of psychiatric unit shower rooms. I would make a poor criminal.)
By being physically locked away from the equipment needed to do my usual rituals then, my rituals changed and adapted. The OCD was too strong to just disappear at the first hurdle in the road and instead my compulsive behaviours became located in areas nobody could lock me out of, areas nobody could bar my access too, those areas being found in my own head (just left of imagination next to the frontal lobe to be specific).

The reason this invisible kind of thought ritual OCD is less talked about than its more apparent variants is probably because of how difficult it is to explain (let alone understand…seriously if you are following this get on that Mensa thing). Nevertheless, difficult or not I think it is a really important topic to raise awareness of as like I said near the start, some people may be suffering from OCD in this way and not really aware of it. I have been in treatment for years so when aspects of my OCD became internal I knew immediately what it was, yet I am sure there will be people out there struggling who never knew that this was a thing. Perhaps there are people out there silently suffering, in distress as they find themselves having to paint ticks and avoid imaginary gales without having any idea of why or how to stop it. Had I no knowledge of OCD and were I experiencing such things there is a good chance I wouldn’t tell anyone because even I can admit that thought rituals sound a bit “crazy” and are not something you would want to bring up voluntarily or admit to, especially if you didn’t know anyone else felt the same. Maybe people with thought rituals don’t even realise it is OCD because they think OCD is washing, and it is for those people (as well as any other lovely people reading this of course) that I have written this post.

If you are struggling with compulsively carrying out intricate thought patterns that cause distress if not performed correctly, you certainly are not alone and it doesn’t mean you are crazy. Obviously I cannot diagnose anyone online, but if you relate to this post there is a good chance that what you are struggling with is an invisible form of OCD. That probably sounds scary if you haven’t ever considered yourself as a person with mental illness in need of therapy, but hopefully it will provide some comfort knowing that your struggles are part of an illness that can be treated. It is not something to be suffered in silence even if your routines are performed in such a manner and I would urge anyone out there relating to this to go to the GP and ask for help. If they have any awareness of mental health issues they will NOT think you are “weird”, they will understand that this is a common issue for OCD sufferers and hopefully by speaking out you will be able to get the help you need. Also if there are any GPs out there or students training in medicine, maybe this post could help you identify these symptoms and help someone in the future. Either way I really think invisible thought OCD rituals need more discussion. The more we are aware of OCD, the more we can understand and most importantly of all, defeat it.

Take care everyone x

mantlepiece