You Might Want to Try Medication.
Shane saw a therapist for a couple of months before it got really rough. At first, Shane seemed totally fine, managing his OCD – and then he started getting flustered and frustrated and really unhappy.
Shane’s OCD was telling him things that didn’t make any sense – as it always had been – but now Shane knew it was OCD. He just didn’t know how to make it stop.
And that meant he had to face the demons.
If you swallow, the OCD would say, the whole world is going to die.
Shane is one of the sweetest, most harmless creatures on the face of the earth. He wouldn’t purposefully hurt anyone.
But here’s the way OCD treatment (called Exposure and Response Prevention) works: In spite of what OCD was telling him – that swallowing would be deadly – Shane had to swallow. He had to, because it was a human reflex action. And he had to, even though he truly believed that it would kill the whole world.
And then he felt guilty, because he was “trying” to murder people.
It was a nightmare. And it was a nightmare that we were compelled to share with the therapist.
“You might want to try medication,” said the therapist – who, as a licensed social worker, could not prescribe medication.
So we have started on the search for a psychiatrist to prescribe medication.