Before I begin, I have a serious question for Mr. Dreier. How many pistachio colored shirts do you have? Seriously. You should answer this.
OCD is interesting to me because I've always felt that my mom had obsessive compulsive disorder. She cleans the house like it's buried under piles of dirt. Neat freak doesn't even begin to describe her, but she insists that she does not have OCD. To learn more about this disorder, I put my faith in the ever trustworth Google and found this article.
Some of the symptoms fit my mom perfectly, while others do not. Which leads me to believe that maybe she just has a mild form of the disorder. It's not as though she does the same exact thing every day, but she gets extremely anxious when things aren't in their place and spotless. But what exactly causes OCD?
There are parts of the brain involved in fear and anxiety, and scientists believe this is the root cause of the disorder. To learn more about what causes it, click here. Basically, if you have OCD, your brain has difficulty turning off or ignoring impulses from a certain circuit. So, does this mean that the fear and anxiety are amplified, and they aren't able to relieve those feelings until they complete a certain action?
I guess my next question is, if this lack of circuit impulse ignoring could be fixed, what would the solution be? I mean, of course a drug could be a temporary fix, but that means they'd have to take that drug for the rest of their lives, and that's not exactly incredibly exciting. What if a permanent solution could be found?
If a permanent solution to OCD could be found, that'd be great! Unfortunately, to my knowledge, it doesn't exist. What I wonder though is whether research to eliminate OCD in people is being done.
ReplyDeleteI know exactly what you mean! After reading the first article I really do believe that my mom also shows very mild signs of OCD. I really liked your second article because it focused on the different psychological perspectives that we have learned in class. It was a really good real world example of how we can use the different perspectives to diagnosis disorders.
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