Mental Health: OCD isn’t just being ‘too tidy’. It made me think I was a killer and a pedophile

If I had a pound for every time someone told me they were ‘a little bit OCD’, I’d be a very rich woman indeed. Elon Musk rich. Lord Alli rich. Taylor Swift rich.

I’d be writing this from the Bahamas, refusing to return to Britain unless the Prime Minister could guarantee me a police escort from my private jet to one of my many mansions.

As it is, I’m writing it from the kitchen table of my terraced house in south London, wondering when it might be reasonable to turn the central heating on (mid-November?).

It never ceases to amaze me how often a serious mental illness is used as shorthand for someone being extremely tidy, as a way of complimenting a person on their neatness.

It’d be like describing a multitasker as a ‘little bit schizophrenic’; not only hugely offensive, but wildly inaccurate in terms of conveying what it’s actually like to live with.

It’s currently OCD Awareness Week, and whilst I usually give short shrift to such events, given they usually do little more than give corporations an excuse to ‘ mental health wash’ their brands, I’ll make an exception for OCD.

This is partly because I’ve had it since I was a little girl, and partly because few people talk about the reality of it, causing thousands to suffer needlessly as a result.

For me, OCD has never manifested itself as a need to be super organised or tidy – much to the disappointment of my husband, who jokes that he wishes I had ‘the good type of OCD’.

In truth, there is no good type. It is called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for a reason, in that, however it manifests, it causes significant distress to the person who is experiencing it.

But the apparent messiness of my symptoms meant it took me years to know that what I had was a definable mental illness that could be helped with treatment.

In that time I developed umpteen unhelpful coping mechanisms – alcohol addiction being the primary one – to deal with the unfathomable darkness in my brain.

There was nothing funny, cute, or admirable about being more than a little bit OCD.

Here is the stark reality of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: at times it makes you feel more like Ted Bundy than David Beckham.

At 11, I woke up one morning convinced I was dying of Aids, and that I would pass it on to my family.

So I washed my hands obsessively, slept with my toothbrush under my pillow, and began muttering phrases that I hoped would keep them alive.

As I entered my teens, my brain started to tell me I might have hurt someone and blanked it out in horror.

I also became convinced I might be a serial-killing paedophile (and we wonder why nobody talks about OCD!) I only started to get help for OCD in my 30s, after I had my daughter, and the monstrous voice in my head began telling me all the awful things that might happen to her.

I’d sit for hours by her cot, watching her chest go up and down, repeating phrases I hoped would prevent anything bad from befalling her.

Such simple things as changing her nappy, or making up her feed, became almost impossible, because of the terrible questions that rushed through my brain: what if I hurt her, or put poison in the bottle?

I’d later learn that OCD is incredibly common in new mothers, whose brains are sent into a sort of sleep-deprived, hormonal overdrive, and who, like me, often find those precious first months of parenthood a hideous nightmare from which there seems no escape.

The best way to describe OCD is that your brain refuses to acknowledge what your eyes can see: that your hands are clean, that the iron is unplugged, that you just drove over a speed bump – not a human.

Paradoxically, OCD is an attempt by our brains to help us feel safe, but it achieves quite the opposite.

Put simply, OCD involves trying to calm intrusive thoughts (obsessions) with rituals ( compulsions). We all have intrusive thoughts – what if I pushed that person in front of the train, or jumped in this river? – but most of us dismiss them as the randomness of the brain, rather than proof of anything inherently bad within us, and get on with the day.

But someone with OCD will become distressed by the thoughts, and ruminate on them again and again. Through a combination of antidepressants and therapy – the gold standard for OCD is something called Exposure and Response Prevention, which involves gradually confronting obsessions instead of trying to avoid them – I now live a life that is largely OCD free.

But for me the most helpful thing has been talking about it publicly, and meeting other people who suffer from this most misunderstood of illnesses.

It’s why I’ve dedicated this week’s episode of my podcast, The Life Of Bryony, to the subject, with an interview with the Cranford actress Kimberley Nixon, who speaks movingly about her terrifying experience of OCD after the traumatic birth of her first child during the pandemic.

I hope you’ll listen, and that it might give you pause the next time you go to describe yourself as ‘a little bit OCD’.