OCD and Me

In my teenage years, I experienced some problems with depression and eating disorders, and I was aware that my mother had postnatal depression after the birth of my brother, so I was very aware in the lead-up to the birth of my first child of the need to be vigilant and to seek help if I found myself descending into those dark depths. Happily, despite the odd day of "baby blues" and exhaustion (first baby, huge change!) I settled into life with my precious little one and found being a mother to be an enormous source of joy. There were no signs of the depression I had been concerned about, and I was extremely happy. There were many challenges, of course, and I felt the same fears that I think all parents do - plus a few extra personal to me - but I mostly managed fairly well to find a good balance.

Then COVID hit When my daughter was just about to turn two, COVID hit, and so of course for us, like so many people, life suddenly changed enormously. We were all frightened of this invisible enemy - especially early on, when the mechanisms for transmission weren't fully known, I was very careful with hand washing, and was an early adopter of masks in the supermarket. But despite these fears, my attitude to "germs" in general remained pretty normal given the circumstances. Time passed and everyone kind of got used to living with COVID, and in the summer of 2020, my partner and I decided we would like to give our little girl a brother or sister. We were lucky, and I became pregnant within a month. I spent a lot of that winter avoiding crowded public spaces (the vaccine was not yet approved and pregnant women were considered high-risk), but the pregnancy itself went smoothly and our little boy was born in March 2021. Although COVID was a scary time, I managed to stay pretty laid-back about "bugs", dirt, and so on - I grew up in the country with dogs and cats, and my parents, both doctors, took a relaxed approach too (by which I mean, things were clean, but they didn't disinfect us kids or the house every five minutes). My attitude with my daughter was always similar. And I want to add that we also have a dog.

An alarming information leaflet Then, one afternoon when my son was around four months old, something strange happened. My daughter had just joined a "Waldspielgruppe", a sort of kids club in the forest, a common daytime activity for little children in Switzerland, the country we live in. As part of the sign-up documentation, the leaders sent a leaflet about fox tapeworm, or Echinococcus multilocularis. Essentially, it said this parasite is found in foxes in Switzerland, and although rare, can cause (incurable) and serious disease in humans who come into contact with fox feces, so it is important to wash hands well after coming back from the forest. It was simply designed as an information leaflet, and was not sensationalist - similar information leaflets exist for ticks, for example.

I would not let my son be on the floor unless I had sterilized it

However, for some reason, it was like this information entered my brain and caused a short circuit or malfunction of some sort. In the space of a few hours, I found I could not stop thinking about this parasite, and began searching for any information I could online. I tortured myself about all the times my daughter had played in the woods and then immediately eaten a snack, or the times our dog had rolled in something nasty and I had simply washed her in the bath, without bleaching the entire house. I became obsessed with what I or my partner or anyone else who entered our house might have walked in, so although we do not wear shoes inside anyway, I began to regularly use bleach (which is known to kill the parasites) to wash the hallway, the floors, the sink, the taps, the door handles...and so on. And this just snowballed very fast into a whole series of complex rituals - the compulsions - that were an attempt to make my brain be quiet, and stop torturing me. But of course, these compulsions were only of limited effectiveness, and so I soon found myself thinking about fox tapeworms for many, many hours a day, and bleaching, washing, steaming everything repeatedly. I would wash and wipe my children's hands multiple times whenever they had been outside at all, I would tell my 3-year-old daughter not to touch leaves. I would not let my son be on the floor unless I had sterilized it. I would wash toys at very high temperatures if they ever so much as brushed the floor. I would yell at my husband for not abiding by my complicated "rules" for sock removal, hand washing, etc. I washed and bleached and scrubbed so much that my hands were literally bleeding and so many of my clothes were ruined with bleach stains. I was exhausted, but I would always be questioning if I had done enough to remove all the invisible contamination that I imagined was everywhere and that could lead to my children becoming sick. Lying in bed at night, my thoughts would spiral round and round as I relived every step of our days, trying to identify any possible contamination and planning how to avoid such instances in the future.

"I was terrified medical professionals might consider me to be an unfit mother" The focus of my life narrowed and narrowed until my obsessions and compulsions were impacting my life and the lives of my family, and when I saw that my behavior was limiting my kids' enjoyment of normal activities, I knew that I had to change something. But I was so afraid to talk to anyone - as an expat who doesn't speak fluent German, and who doesn't know the system inside out, I was terrified that medical professionals might consider me to be an unfit mother and that my children would be removed from me if I admitted that I was struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder. But I knew that I had to do something, so I read a lot, I spoke to a therapist, I meditated, I tried very, very hard to step back from the brink of my obsessive-compulsive behaviors and thoughts, which made me sometimes feel like I was going crazy. I went away for a month with the family for an extended holiday and managed to put it out of my mind (admittedly to an area where the fox tapeworm does not exist). Finding a way back to "normal" Little by little, things got a bit better. Now, more than a year on, I can say that I have improved a lot. I no longer stop my children from playing with the leaves or stroking the dog. I try to only ask them to wash their hands before they eat, or when it is rational and appropriate. I (mostly) only bleach the floor once or twice a week. And I no longer spend hours into the night reading and re-reading scientific studies about Echinococcus multilocularis. When I find my thoughts drifting, I try to ground myself in the present (using the 333 Rule, for example, a grounding technique that directs people to identify three objects they can see, hear, and touch; a method explained also here).

Now I know that I am not alone

OCD came into my life like a train and for a while, I could not get off, and it left me feeling incredibly isolated and lonely. I have since discovered that it is relatively common after pregnancy - indeed, perinatal OCD is a recognized condition, and I know that I am not alone: it affects 2-3 in every 100 women in the year after having a baby. Like any parent, I am overwhelmed by the love I feel for my children, and the desire to protect them from any harm, but I think in my case, this desire spiraled into something less than rational, which then took on its own momentum. I am still working on dominating my OCD - even though the best treatment, ERP (exposure and response prevention) is extremely tough for me. But now I feel that I have at least some tools to make my way back to "normal" life when the rituals and thoughts start to take over, and I can enjoy a walk in the forest with my family once again.