How Covid-9 is affecting my mental health as someone with OCD
While Covid-19 spreads around the world, advice has gone out about how to look after your mental health during the outbreak.
I have OCD, and have seen many people with contamination-based obsessions and compulsions posting on OCD forums. For people who have struggled with obsessive handwashing in the past and been told to reduce those compulsions, the current advice on frequent and prolonged handwashing and other precautionary advice has been a trigger.
My OCD isn’t based around contamination and hygiene usually, although I did over the past few days become a bit panicked by articles saying how much bacteria is on people’s phones, and spent a couple of hours frantically Googling articles about how to make it clean and looking at antibacterial wipes and UV sterilizers. However, the virus has triggered my OCD in other ways.
My OCD is, as is the case with most people’s, based around control. I feel a strong need to count, measure, time or otherwise control most aspects of my life. And with the advice on precautions changing by the hour, and likely to keep changing in the future- should we self-isolate if we live with someone who has symptoms? Should we work from home? Should we go out for dinner? Should we stop visiting older relatives?- my routine has been thrown out, and this is making me panic. I like to plan out the coming hours, days and weeks with certainty, and that’s not really possible right now.
I’m worried about the possibility of the country (I live in the UK) going into lockdown in the future. As part of my OCD, I do a certain amount of walking every week. After therapy, this is much less obsessive than it used to be. I used to time my walking to the second with a stopwatch, taking it everywhere with me. I don’t do that now, but I do go out walking one lunchtime every week, as well as walking to and from the train station and work every day, and if I have to miss one of these walking sessions, I get very anxious- in fact I don’t let myself miss a session. If we are all forced to go into isolation, are we even allowed to go out walking? The idea of missing that feels me with panic.
Even worse, though, are my obsessions around work. One of my biggest OCD worries is the idea of losing my job. In a recent therapy session I explored this, and came to the conclusion that it is based around money. I was brought up to see money as important, and I panic at the thought of not having an income. I actually have a fair amount of savings and am in a better position than a lot of people, but it’s that idea of control again. I want to control how much money I have and plan what to use it for. The idea of having to spend it all to make up for a loss of income freaks me out.
My compulsions around this obsession play out at work by trying to control the number of emails I have, by avoiding answering some if I don’t think I have enough. This always comes back to bite me, as I then find myself way too busy and get behind because I have avoided answering them previously. This had recently flared up because of some changes made at work anyway. But they have got worse with the Covid-19 outbreak.
My wife had been worried about her job recently as the company were struggling to get jobs in and she is now saying this might be even worse with the virus going around. The thought of not having her income terrifies me and I’m spending a lot of time really anxious and worrying about her losing her job.
I currently work four days a week, with a group therapy programme all day on a Monday. I am lucky that my company are paying sick leave for me to attend this therapy. However there is the prospect that the therapy group might have to close down for a few months as the situation with Covid-19 gets worse. There are already people in the group who have decided not to come in because of their worries around passing the virus to vulnerable relatives.
If the group does close, I will have to go back to working five days a week for a while. I can’t take sick leave for just sitting at home every Monday! But the idea terrifies me. As well as the fact that I won’t have the support of therapy for that time (and part of the contract we entered into when starting the group was not to see any other therapists during that time), I am really scared that I won’t have enough work for five days and will run out and get fired. Logically I can see that this is OCD thinking- as it is I am not getting through all my work in four days, we are short-staffed and everyone else is struggling so I could always help them out. But I am going over and over it in my brain and panicking that it might result in me losing my job. I know my work-based compulsions are likely to get worse in the coming weeks and months.
One of the pieces of advice about how to look after your mental health is to reduce the amount of time you spend reading or watching the news, and to do other things to distract yourself. I think this could be useful advice for me to follow. Over the past few days I’ve obsessively refreshed the news app I use every few minutes to see what’s going on with the virus, even when watching a film or playing games. It started with just a general interest but now I think doing this is proving
counter-productive and increasing my anxiety as more and more infections are reported and precautions advised. Over the coming weeks and months, I will try to take each day as it comes and not worry too much about how things will change in the future.