by James Middleton – Wednesday, 28 July 2010, 08:05 AM
Think of instances when having an OCD may be resourceful?
In my work in Psychiatry over the years, OCD as a label seemed to be extremely common and we saw a lot of patients who were described as such.
If you have worked in the Psychiatric field, the types of obsessions I came across most often and were asked to try and help were the checkers and the hand washers. The checkers were those individuals who spent a great deal of the day, checking various things to make sure they were safe. Some examples might be door latches, window latches, gas knobs, telephone rests, Central heating on or off, and so on. The handwashers were as described, they spent hours washing their hands to ensure all germs were destroyed.
The kinds of patients that the psychiatrists mostly saw and weren’t usually referred to the CPN’s (Community Psychiatric Nurses) and OT’s the Occupational Therapists, but were sometimes referred to the psychologists were those whose obsessive or compulsive thoughts were mostly in the mind, and not being carried out. They could be described as having intrusive thoughts, which never went away. These patients were by far the hardest to treat, because they never did anything – they never carried out any activity to release their discomfort. They just had circular thoughts which they couldn’t seem to switch off.
Fortunately for some of these patients, medication did seem to provide some relief, but it was rare that either the thoughts or the behaviours were ever eliminated entirely.
A few years ago, my electric guitar teacher told me how he had learned to play the guitar so well in a relatively short space of time.
Apparently from the moment he got up out of bed to the moment he went to bed, he strapped on his guitar and walked around his flat with the guitar hanging from his neck/shoulders. He spent every moment of every day – while he was in his flat, playing, listening to records, or thinking about his guitar.
He told me the only time he took his guitar off was when he went out of his flat to sign on the dole, or get his food shopping, or do his washing at the local launderette.
Within a couple of years he had accelerated his ability as if he had been playing for years. He became a renowned electric guitar tutor at our local music shop in Birmingham, joined several bands and played in Eastern Europe for several years with the reformed Slade band as backup guitarist. A few years after this I lost touch with him, so I don’t know what he’s up to now.
He later told me his girlfriend left him and moved out of his flat because this was all he did. Nevertheless he was prepared to forsake his relationship for guitar mastery. It seemed to work for him. Whether it was a balanced way or not is debatable.
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