Is COVID-19 Causing an "Epidemic" of OCD?
Coping with anxiety due to the pandemic
Posted October 15, 2020 | Reviewed by Matt Huston
Have you ever experienced any of the following?
Before March 2020 if a person had described the above experiences it would have seemed that their anxiety was getting the best of them, to say the least, and very likely that they suffered from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) . Most of us who don’t suffer from OCD would say that the above thoughts and behaviors are much more than what is generally called for in everyday life, or at least before COVID-19 became a universal cause for concern.
Unfortunately, the COVID crisis has made these and other anxious thoughts and behaviors a common and everyday experience for many of us worldwide. Does this mean that now we all have OCD?
The answer is that generally, no, most of us do not newly have OCD if we did not suffer from OCD prior to the pandemic. Rather, the more general cause for concern and alarm has increased across the board for almost all of us. Many of us may now have more compassion for people who suffer from OCD because we have a newfound awareness of what it’s like to have these worries be top of mind, to have to change our everyday behaviors in ways we would have never expected to reduce the spread of disease, and to stay alert for new information and/or reasons for concern.
As defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), OCD involves recurrent obsessive thinking and/or compulsive actions (called rituals) that are severe enough to be time-consuming and to cause significant distress or interference with daily life. One of the most frequent manifestations of OCD is a form called "contamination OCD" (formerly called hypochondriasis) which can be described as the fear of a threat such as dirt, germs, toxic chemicals, becoming ill, or spreading contamination to others. In addition to intense fears and intrusive thoughts, people with this form of OCD typically have compulsive behaviors that are responses to the anxiety or level of threat and serve the function of reducing the level of distress or mitigating the threat.
The COVID pandemic has caused many of us to reconsider how vulnerable we are as we move about the world and to worry about whether we can cope with what this international public health crisis may bring to our communities. While there are some people, likely a small minority, who will have new-onset OCD or health anxiety, many of us are experiencing what we would call a relatively universal reaction to something that we view as a threat to all of us in our society. As the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic presses on, we see an overall increase of stress and anxiety in the general public at large. The pandemic has impacted everyone differently, and sometimes in surprising ways. It may have caused increased anxiety in some people who wouldn’t have expected it and not done so in some people who would have thought they'd be more impacted.
What should I do to address this anxiety if I have it? It depends on the situation. For example, if we were treating a person with contamination OCD, the treatment would typically involve finding ways to fight the impulses caused by the OCD so as to cause the OCD to lose its power . In a typical case of OCD, the OCD sufferer’s assessment of the level of threat or danger is exaggerated and based more on emotional reasoning than the facts at hand, and often people who suffer from OCD may struggle to reconcile their feelings versus what they know to be logically true. Treatment of OCD includes interventions focused on facing your fears, proving that there really is no threat or the threat is exaggerated, undoing the systems and rules that are in place because of the OCD, and not doing whatever the OCD tells you to do.
Unlike in the case of contamination OCD, our current reality is that the threat is very real, not imagined. At the same time, the threat is not necessarily omnipresent in all situations and environments, and our scientific understanding of the virus has improved dramatically over the past months.
Here Are Some Tips for Dealing With Anxiety Caused by the COVID Crisis:
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Sharon M. Batista, M.D. , is a board-certified psychiatrist in private practice in New York City and an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.