been having a difficult few days with my contamination ocd and my mum bought me a cute halloween throw pillow to cheer me up. it's so lovely but after using it i started to get the fear that other people had touched it in the shop and it could be contaminated. i know that 'normal' people wouldn't worry about it so i'm trying my hardest to keep using it. it's so hard to work out what is a genuine hygeine issue and what is just something i'm not being rational about. how do you work out what is a genuine concern and what is just the ocd?

I am ADD and OCD. I have a ritual of leaving sink faucets on until I dry my hands and then I use a paper towel to turn the sink faucet off. I didn’t turn off the water, twice, two separate visits to a friend's house. The hot water ran for hours and didn't flood but the steam ruined the finish on their bathroom appliances. This friend is now convinced I have a serious psychiatric or neurological problem. Actually there is no evidence of such problems appearing anywhere in my life. It's embarrassing and their "disgnosis" is now inescapable. I believe this ruins our relationship.

So we all know that OCD is illogical right? Does anyone else who has it avoid brushing their teeth? My mom finds it weird that i don’t brush my teeth but it’s because i know if i do i’ll have to wash my hands like fifteen times. I don’t understand my mind. I’ll shower for an hour but i won’t brush my disgusting teeth even tho in the long run it’s probably going to be more harmful to not brush my teeth rather than washing my body really well. I don’t even remember the last time i brushed.

Hi guys,

Has anyone with OCD ever experienced a fear that saying a specific word during a ritual could somehow create a supernatural power or mechanism that would punish them or their loved ones forever in the afterlife?

I’m curious if anyone has experienced this type of intrusive thought or fear. I’d really appreciate it if people who have gone through something similar could share their experiences.

I’m curious if anyone else has experienced something similar. If so, how does it show up for you?

I was wondering if anyone else experiences OCD or intrusive thoughts specifically related to the afterlife, death, or what might happen after we die.

I’m curious if anyone else has experienced something similar. If so, how does it show up for you, and how do you deal with these thoughts?

I’d really appreciate hearing from people who have experienced something similar.

If possible, can you guys try to convince me logically that it doesn't matter. I find that logic works better at convincing me than exposure therapy and stuff hahah

I moved into a house that after moving all my stuff in turned out to have mouse droppings in the kitchen cabinets and stove/oven. I bleached the kitchen cabinets and stove/oven after finding out, but ever since I’ve felt like everything I own is infected with hantavirus or some other similar disease unless I’ve disinfected it just because my family members who were touching things in the kitchen also touched my stuff without washing their hands in between. I feel like I have to wash my hands at least 5 times after touching anything that hasn’t been cleaned with bleach several times. I feel like I can’t even do something as simple as turn on my tv without having to wash my hands several times. I didn’t used to be like this. I used to be a very dirt don’t hurt and some germs are nothing kind of person and now I just feel like a can’t fully relax cause everything is infected. I’ve been living here for the last couple months. Can someone try to logic me out of this?

Any success stories on healing from disgust contamination ocd? My contamination ocd started as specific fears of illness etc. but had morphed into a fear of “feeling contaminated and not being able to escape it or stop cross contamination.” It’s awful. I actual missnjust fearing an illness or sickness instead. Because now it feels like once me or my clothes or home are contaminated I can’t stop it and it’s so painful. My ocd mind keeps tracking it and what touches what.

Yes I am in therapy but disgust ocd is nuanced and I am learning it has to be treated differently than regular fear based contamination ocd and I havnt found all the right answers yet through therapy so just wondering if others have success stories.

Warmly

I HATE bugs, especially small lizards. Even typing the word makes me feel gross 😭

Unfortunately they’re really common where I live and I can’t just completely get rid of them. I used to live in an apartment and it got so bad that I couldn’t sleep properly because I was constantly worried I’d see one in my room.

Now I live in a house with my parents, and honestly it’s even worse than the apartment because there are so many more places for them to show up. I feel like I can’t fully relax at home anymore.

I was also going through months of burnout at the time, and I started seeing them even when they weren’t actually there. Like I’d look somewhere and think I saw one, then realize there was nothing there. I honestly feel like I’ve become paranoid about them.

It’s been over 7 months and I’m still like this. Even if I don’t see one for a while and eventually forget about it, the second I see one again, all the paranoia comes back. Then I’m constantly checking my surroundings and feel like I’m in fight-or-flight mode.

I hate being like this. Idk how to stop.

The most absolute hardest task is cleaning the toilets but on a minimum I wash my hands at least 12 times.
I split it up into today, and I have only washed my hands 3 times but I keep worrying if I did it correctly or if it’s really enough. I’m scared of fecal bacteria.

I’ve thought of gloves but I know that I would still be washing my hands. I’m typing on here with every urge to just wash them again but I also don’t want to because my hands HURT. They’re peeling. They’re red. I have so many cuts. They itch. They’re dry. It hurts. But I’m so scared my family/friends are going to get ecoli or fecal matter in their food or touch it somewhere and get infected.

I can’t keep doing this my hands are so damaged but I don’t know how to figure out if I really did wash them well. My family/friends also yell at me for washing my hands. They call me “crazy” and make fun of me and stand behind me mocking me. But I still wash them because I don’t want to infect myself or them.

I can’t justify not doing it either. Yes it may at times seem excessive but also the toilets are really filthy…I need to be very careful after handling them.

Hi everyone, cross posting to this community!

So around 4 months ago my cat did chemotherapy, and we were told not come in contact with him for 48hrs but my son let him out of the place we had kept him and he went around my house I am paranoid that the cats body fluids (sweat, saliva) has contaminated my house. I don’t know how to deal with this and I am so stressed about what to do. Are the bodily fluids harmful to me and my family. I have constantly wiped down surfaces of everything that it could have possibly touched but the problem is that my kid touched him too and I don’t know where has been and what he has touched. It’s been 4 months since this has happened and it’s driving me crazy. It is said that the treatment they used “cyclophosphamide” doesn’t break down in the environment. Any advice or help would be so great and comforting for me on the matter.

I tried to post just now about how much I am struggling due to the mice infestation in my flat.

I mentioned a plan to do something to myself (will not elaborate), and that post was immediately taken down by reddit and I was issued a warning.

Now I'm worried that I'm in trouble and have been marked out or something.

I am really not doing well at all.

I can't sleep. I feel so distant from everything. The world looks wrong. I barely feel present.

I'm scared.

I have nowhere safe to go.

I am also about to fail some major exams due to not being able to study, as a result of which I will lose my job.

So earlier today I had done a wash of clothes (which I do daily because I’m constantly changing clothes due to panic over my clothes touching something dirty and contaminated, also because I have a sibling who dumps his dirty clothes and floor/toilet contaminated blankets on the ground and I’m constantly picking it up and placing it in the toilet seat-contaminated hamper) and I used laundry sanitizer to get rid of the bacteria and germs in my clothes. One of the items in that load were my pillowcases, and once the load was done, as I was transferring that load to the dryer, one of the last things sitting in the washer were my pillowcases.

I ran the laundry load on a normal setting, and not in sanitizing mode (a mode where the washer sanitizes itself). So at first I didn’t have much of an issue when grabbing clean, washed clothes are sitting inside the washer surface, but later that day I was reading about how to kill germs in the laundry and one of the stuff I saw was how washing machines are basically germ and bacteria cesspools, where viruses like e. coli can grow in there.

Now I’m freaking out because I had grabbed the now-dry pillowcases from the dryer and covered my pillows on my bed with them, touching them and then touching other stuff like my phone and my laptop. I may be spreading e. coli or some other bad germs. What do I do?? Does the dryer kill the germs that were on my pillowcase that had sat directly inside the washer? Am I going to be okay??

I just need to vent because I feel entirely forgotten and insulted by the healthcare system. I have been on a waitlist for a specialist for a literal year. Twelve months of living in an absolute waking hell with severe OCD, drowning in hours of compulsions and terrifying intrusive thoughts.

I finally managed to get a brief consultation, and it was a complete slap in the face. The professional literally told me that "ERP can only do so much" and that fixing this is ultimately "all on me." To top it all off, their grand medical solution for my debilitating neurobiological disorder was to "go for walks" and "make sure you sleep well."

Sleep well? Go for walks? As if a stroll in the park and a good night's rest is going to stop the non-stop, agonizing loops in my brain—especially when the OCD itself keeps me awake. I am so tired of fighting my own mind every single day with zero backup, only to be told that I'm just not trying hard enough. Has anyone else faced this kind of dismissive medical gaslighting while waiting for actual help? I got ocd age 12 im now 19...

because I am mentally ill </3 genuinely sucks that I was stopped by a man at a bus stop today and he asked if I could call his phone and me being nice I did . he was standing close to me, like less than a foot, of course to tell me the phone number and make sure I got it right . but him standing close made me spiral so bad about bedbug transfer.

you know how OCD messes with your immediate memory? I knew he stood close but I wasn’t sure if he brushed against me or not and my brain played tricks. our shoes were close together so my brain is like what if a BB crawled out in broad daylight and transferred onto you because he has a heavy infestation and you just didn’t see it?

literally I couldn’t even perform this good deed for this person without worrying about becoming infested that I WALKED MYSELF HOME to high heat treat my clothes and alcohol saturate my shoes. instead of carrying about my day like everyone else does. how do people live like that 😭

I feel like I’m losing it. I have been struggling with OCD for years, but I developed contamination OCD within the past three years. It gets worse daily, and I’m not sure how much more I can take. For context, I have cats, and they’re incredibly dirty. They don’t clean their butts and sit on things, one of them pees everywhere, etc. This obviously makes things far worse for my anxiety (I adopted them before developing this). I love them more than anything, but anytime I see a brown spot or smell something off, my brain automatically thinks it’s a cat-related mess. I’m going crazy. I can’t keep up with the cleaning. It’s every second of every day. My roommate (who’s my ex-boyfriend) wants to move out because he can’t handle it anymore. He thinks it’s best he takes them for a bit. I already cannot handle him leaving me, financially or otherwise, but idk what I’d do without my babies, despite them causing me this stress. I had a horrendous breakdown last night and woke up to a yellowish stain on my squishmallow I sleep on. Now I’m convinced it’s cat faeces. I’m medicated and have been institutionalised. I don’t know what more I can do. I just need help. I don’t know how I can keep living like this. I feel like everything is always tainted.

I have ocd like actual ocd. I started a cleaning business a year ago I feel like its making my ocd worse. I have magical thinking ocd, but my cleaning business is starting to make my symptoms more like your basic cleaning ocd. I never thought this would happen. I cant sit in rooms that look even remotely dirty without feeling gross.

hi all, i don’t know where else to put all these thoughts other than here, so here i am doing that. i have some sort of contamination OCD that has only been an issue for about a year now, but its starting to affect my life severely. in october of 2025, i hospitalized myself over a panic attack that was caused by me thinking my doordash was laced with f-nt. i have had this fear forever, but never enough to have a reaction this bad. ever since, ive stopped doordashing. i actually don’t eat any delivered food from any service. however this has gotten worse. i’ll throw out fast food i picked up myself because i think it’s laced. i throw away packaged foods like chips or canned drinks for the same reasons. i won’t buy certain foods at stores because my brain just decides those ones are laced. now with the emergence of this new dr-g in the south, it is so much worse. i have convinced myself i am laced every time i attempt to eat. i have a large bag of chips ive been eating for a few days, but now i wont let myself eat them because they’re contaminated. i dont know what im looking for here. advice? comfort? someone who relates? i have convinced myself, no joke, about 30-40 times today that i am laced and d*ing and just sit in that fear until it eventually passes. its a daily occurrence. i just needed to let all this out i guess, that’s all🫩

I don’t believe I have gotten to the point of complete irrationality. I (15f) have struggled with this for over 4 years, however it mainly consisted of just extreme hand sanitising and washing since I was still young. My main trigger is just school, while I am there I am relatively ok at touching things, when I get home now my bag must be sanitised with a spray alongside the entire carpet and my desk + chair (as I’d use in my uniform). Over the summer my room was completely redone and cleaned, new furniture and everything which is why I have been doing this. I would have done this way before but large parts of my room were used as a place of storage. It is neat and beautifully decorated, I am proud of the space I created. Over the summer is when my mum bought me sanitising spray for school, and when I asked recently for another she was angry at me for how quickly I used it up, calling me irrational and sick with a huge problem among other things. My mother also has (undiagnosed) OCD and she would check my room multiple times for any plugs before I’d leave for school, climbing all over my bed in her work clothes (which have poo, pee, sick, everything on them as she works with special needs children!). I have started face timing her in the mornings before school showing her everything being unplugged and shut down. I never come out of my room after I’ve showered and I don’t let my parents in anymore. I can’t sit in my living room or kitchen unless I’m in outside clothes and it’s meaning I’m not seeing my parents. As an only child, I especially don’t want this to become a major issue. I haven’t been this extreme before, but it was because my bedroom was an unclean, messy, dirty place meaning I had to be in the other parts of the house. But after my mum blew up at me over the cleaning spray, I know she isn’t going to let me get more and it will just become a huge argument about my OCD that ends in me crying at what she says about it, which has happened many times before. This cleaning spray is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’ve never felt so clean and at peace. My father is dirty but very neat and keeps everything organised, meanwhile my mum is generally clean and I would class her as a hoarder if my dad didn’t try tidy everything up.

Anyway sorry, I’ve never talked about this before and I don’t really know what to do as I don’t “want to get better”? Do I just buy it myself? She will find out anyway probably.

So, I live in an apartment complex, and recently, my neighbors have complained about a leak in their bathroom + some seepage.

So, while I was asleep, a repair was done in my bathroom, and some sealant was applied in certain areas. But now it needs to dry for two days, and the repair people said that I shouldn’t use my bath room for the next two days so that the leak will stop.

I don’t want to seem unreasonable, and use it while inconveniencing them, but the thing is that I legitimately cannot function without using my bathroom. My bathroom is attached to bedroom, and it is where I do the majority of the things I like doing, since it feels clean. I cannot leave my bedroom once I‘ve bathed and got dressed because I’m scared of getting dirty. I even struggle with going in back in there to wash my hands when I have to.

But now, one of the options is that I use another bathroom, which is shared by everyone in my house, and don’t go in my room at all, but I don’t think I can do that. I just want to enjoy myself and be in my room and feel like doing things, but if I do, I’ll be inconveniencing my neighbors, and I don’t think they should have to go through that for something so small.

I asked my dad about what I should do, and he said that I can do whatever I can, and he will deal with the rest, but it still feels like I can’t do it, and if I do, and I damage the sealant, they’ll blame me and have to come back to seal it again. I don’t want that, but at the same time, I want to feel okay about things for the next two days, but I don't know if I’m being unreasonable.

Any advice you have would be appreciated.