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Diagnosing Anxiety Disorder
 

OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER

Obsessions are recurrent thoughts, beliefs or ideas that dominate a person's thinking. Despite the fact that people know they are unrealistic and often try to block the thoughts out, they persist, giving rise to anxiety, dread and a sense that maybe the person so affected is going insane. Compulsions in turn are repeated actions, either mental or physical, that people again realize are not appropriate or useful, but which they feel compelled to carry out, usually as an often inexplicable need to neutralize the anxiety that the obsessive thoughts create. To have an obsessive disorder, all of the following must be present:

 
• Recurring, persisting thoughts, impulses or images that are not just extreme worries about ordinary problems and which inappropriately intrude into awareness and cause marked distress or anxiety.
• Attempts to suppress or neutralize thoughts by other thoughts or behaviours.
• An awareness on the part of the patient that these ideas are a product of their own mind and are not superimposed by others.

 

To have a compulsion, all of the following must be present:

 
• A compulsion to repeat physical and mental behaviours as a response to an obsession or in accordance with strictly applied rules, often for elaborate amounts of time.
• The behavior is carried out expressly to reduce or eliminate the distress caused by the obsessive thought or to prevent something bad from happening.
• The behaviour is not realistically related to the events it is supposed to counteract or it is obviously excessive and the patient recognizes it as such.

 

Obsessions and compulsions are associated with at least one of the following:

 

• they cause severe distress
• they take up more than one hour a day
• they interfere with the patient's usual routine or social, work or personal functioning.

 

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Over one million Canadians suffer from some form of depressive illness.