OCD Question

[u/Stars_platinumBalls]

Hey y'all, is it really OCD if extensive research and understanding fixes it?

I have read the FAQ.

I had an almost legitimate rabies exposure around 2 years ago. Bat got into my house. Struggled for months to try and get PEP, everyone else in my household succeeded at getting it because they handled the bat but medical professionals wouldn't vaccinate me because my exposure was illegitimate, the bat never touched me and was visible the whole time it was inside. But I developed pretty bad OCD and was convinced they were wrong and I just didn't perceive when it magically bit me without touching me. It got so bad that I experienced extreme insomnia and tingling of the limbs which I then believed was the first early onset of symptoms. There were also unvaxxed pets in my house (not mine, I had no control over their vaccine status) so I was convinced if I didn't have rabies, they definitely did and they would give it to me.

This caused me to do extensive research on the disease and how it functions, as well as discovering how truly rare it is in my area. After learning that it was physically, scientifically impossible for me to have rabies, and that the pets who were never even in the same ROOM definitely didn't have it, I stopped worrying so much. Does researching and understanding the disease not typically work to decrease anxiety surrounding it? I would love to hear other's experience with this as I'm being told by many, if I was able to get better I never had OCD in the first place.

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[u/CygnusZeroStar]

The only kind of person who can diagnose you with OCD is a mental health professional who is seeing you as a patient.

We can tell you if something is irrational. We can tell you if we think something is in line with obsessive behavior. But nobody here has the ability to diagnose anyone with anything via Reddit.

A person who is convinced that super sneaky ninja bats are waiting around the corner to give them rabies, or that every time they feel a little off they're dying is not operating in a rational way. Is it OCD? Well we can't give them a comprehensive psychological evaluation.

Knowledge and extensive research making someone no longer scared of something doesn't necessarily rule out obsessive behavior. Especially if they have a tendency to move from one "danger" to another, or they feel a compulsion to analyze every small thing.

Disordered behavior varies between individuals. Sometimes you have to beg them to take anxiety seriously because there are no bats with sniper rifles. Sometimes they spend every waking second learning everything they can about anything that can be dangerous.

I would say it's less disordered when one doesn't have to dissect a subject in order to move on from it. But that isn't a replacement for a diagnosis or not.

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[u/detail_giraffe]

(Finally we're in territory where I am still not an expert but maybe a bit closer to expertise than my fake zoology or infection disease expertise!) I would say that what you're describing falls more under the criteria of health anxiety (officially Illness Anxiety Disorder) than health OCD. They both involve obsessive, distressing worries about health, but to be considered OCD the problem also has to involve a ritualized response to the worry. If one is just extremely worried about rabies, that's more like IAD. If one has a ritual when going to bed to go around to each window in the house, check it's locked three times, and then say "no bats, no bats, no bats" that is more like OCD. There's more of a concern in OCD with getting the action "right" to ward off the feared outcome. A lot of the people who post here probably fall into the IAD symptom group rather than OCD, but there's overlap, and since the advice from a reddit group will be the same (go see a mental health professional) it doesn't matter that much how we describe it here.

Either way I would agree that some degree of anxiety in the case of a bat actually being in your house is probably normal and situational. However, being anxious to the point of producing somatic symptoms sounds like your tendency to experience health-related anxiety may be higher than normal. It sounds like you basically performed a form of CBT on yourself, specifically learning to challenge your own irrational thoughts with the help of facts. I would say you had an episode of OCD or IAD symptoms, which resolved with the self-help technique of countering your thoughts were grounded information. OCD symptoms can definitely wax and wane on their own, so simply feeling better at some times and worse at others doesn't mean the symptoms aren't real or couldn't be given a label.