9781422272398

Frequent handwashing is a common compulsion in people with OCD.

simultaneously experience depression because their symptoms overwhelm them, and they might not understand why they are experiencing these strange fears. Or they may be in a treatment program, and discouraged because their progress is slow. In any case, a person with OCD is not defined by his or her symptoms. It is not the whole of his or her identity. No one would choose to have OCD. The disorder is not a cry for attention, the result of watching too many medical dramas, or caused by an overactive imagination. People with OCD are battling an illness, and some of them have been doing so for decades, often with detrimental effects on the people they love the most.

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Behavioral Disorders: Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders