One day 12-year-old Elizabeth McIngvale became obsessed with the number 42, which happened to be her mother’s age at the time, 11 years ago. When she washed her hands, she had to turn the sink on and off 42 times, get 42 pumps of soap and rinse her hands 42 times. Sometimes she decided that she actually needed to do 42 sets of 42. When she dressed, she put her right leg in and out of her pant leg 42 times, then the left. Even getting up from a chair took 42 attempts. She was afraid that if she did not follow her self-prescribed ritual, something terrible would happen to her family—they might die in a car accident, for instance. “Everything I did was completely exhausting and grueling,” she recalls. “I was probably doing 12 to 13 hours a day of rituals.”

McIngvale was diagnosed with obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD), a psychiatric illness that afflicts 2 to 3 percent of Americans, not all of them as severely as McIngvale. Individuals with OCD experience debilitating recurrent and persistent thoughts, or obsessions, which they try to suppress or eliminate with rituals, known as compulsions. Compared with people who have other anxiety or mood disorders, adults with OCD are more likely to be single and unemployed. In fact, OCD is among the 10 most disabling medical and psychiatric conditions.

2 Comments

1. 1. jgrosay 04:45 PM 6/9/11

   Psychoanalists say both OCD and hysteria are connected to childhood sex experiences. While in hysteria the subject had a passive role, in OCD, he or she had an active role in desiring or accepting genital activity. It seems, SciAm said recently, that OCD improves with marriage. OCD seems to protect against schyzophrenia, and in a minor form, it can be a positive asset for some kind of jobs involving activities that need a high level of chek-up, for example, computer programming.

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2. 2. mesmoiron 12:58 PM 6/11/11

   The article said that the girl one day decided to count to 42; this means a conscious decision that went bad. The trick in this case is to define what determines an obsession in an early stage and address it with counter reasoning.
   
   Another example. Someone dislikes the bathroom floor because it is associated with dirt. However running is a super challenge and that person wants to do that absolutely. Now in order to run barefoot; the person has to reconsider the bathroom floor obsession. Because it doesn't make sense to have dirty feet outside, and in the mean time being scared of the bathroom floor inside. The attractiveness of the bare foot running is greater so by doing so; the other obsession is cured.
   
   In my opinion obsession should be address instantly. It's like training the brain gone bad. Retraining the brain is the key. We always assume that something is wrong in the brain, but it can also be that something is imprinted much the wrong way.

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