Having suffered with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for most her life, York woman Rachel Bailey is speaking out about the often misunderstood condition. She talks to health reporter Kate Liptrot.

AS a child, Rachel Bailey began to believe everything she touched would turn green.

In the morning she would get out of bed and put her slippers on carefully so she didn’t touch and contaminate the floor.

She remembers trying to avoid touching cups with her mouth when she drank from them.

“I used to carry wet wipes in my waistband to wipe anything I may have touched. It was endless,” she said, “It got to the point where I had no skin on my hands, my knuckles were swollen, my wrists were swollen, my hands were bleeding because I was washing them so much.

“But my mum was like, ‘thank God, it’s OCD!’ She finally knew what it was.”

A cheerful and articulate 24-year-old, Rachel, from Holgate, doesn’t often tell people she has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) as they can struggle to understand. Having suffered from OCD since she was a young child, Rachel has recently set up a York support group which meets fortnightly at Tesco in Askham Bar.

She has also become a member of the charity OCD Action which works to challenge inaccurate perceptions of the anxiety disorder in which people have unwanted and repeated thoughts or feelings driving them to carry out a ritual to get rid of the obsessive thoughts.

“For years and years I have been held to ransom daily by the thought of worst fears come true,” she said.

“However, I know that to most people, even those closest to me, I appear to be a happy-go-lucky girl. I don’t go around looking dishevelled or making my compulsive behaviours known to others. I have never sought attention or allowances for what I go though - no one would know any different. With this considered, I know that there must be other people out there who are suffering in silence right now, that need support from support groups such as this one.”

Looking back, the symptoms of Rachel’s OCD started when she was a child and she began to feel that everything needed to be “just right” so even a trip to the shoe shop would turn into a nightmare for her mother when shoes wouldn’t feel completely right and she would agonise over telling her mother the truth.

At just six or seven years old and she saw the end of a horror film about someone being possessed. “I picked up the idea and ran with it,” she said, and became convinced she was somehow going to be taken over and she had to do what she could to make sure it didn’t happen.

“I just remember that summer I wasn’t outside playing, I was indoors attending to all these different rituals,” she said, “I just thought ‘I’m not going to be Rachel anymore, unless I do this’.

“It’s something a kid shouldn’t be thinking and it’s really different to how people think OCD should be, it’s quite dark really.”

Her mum became so worried by her daughter’s conviction that she wasn’t herself anymore that Rachel remembers beginning to pretend she was fine and deciding to endure the symptoms of her OCD in silence. But it all emerged again a few years later when she began to believe she was contaminating things. Then as she approached her GCSEs she developed a fear of writing down certain words.

The fact that she couldn’t write the words down was a hindrance in her GCSEs and subsequently meant she didn’t achieve the very high grades she was predicted.

While Rachel got an official diagnosis from the Lime Trees unit for young people in York, and was able to get a few months cognitive behavioural therapy on the NHS, she was then told funding problems meant it would have to stop.

“Now I control my OCD, “ she said, “I have always been quite strong - if you think when I was little, going through all that. It was quite scary for me and a daunting thing to face as a child.”

But despite coping with a sometimes debilitating condition, she fears the term OCD has started to lose credibility as a condition as it is so often used out of context.

It is much more than just being very clean and tidy, Rachel said, who hopes to eventually move from beauty therapy to study psychology at university.

“Everyone has little traits of OCD in them,” she said, “You get people who have to go back and check a tap, but that’s very low level, it’s not causing them any distress. OCD is a spectrum and a sliding scale. What’s at the bottom of the scale bears no resemblance to what’s at the other end. It starts encroaching on your life and becoming really debilitating.”

“The word OCD has no credibility as a mental illness anymore. You hear it coined so freely it’s lost all meaning which I find quite shocking in this day and age when everything is politically correct. It’s diminishing an illness”.

Rachel said having OCD is like a “glitch in your brain” which gives too much importance to intrusive thoughts and leads to an ultimatum: “if you don’t do this, this will happen. Even when you try and rationalise thoughts there’s an element of doubt, she said.”Even though you know intellectually, I probably shouldn’t be on the floor, crossing out words frantically, what OCD does is it exploits that 0.001 per cent chance you should be. In the end it defies all logic.”

Rachel is encouraging anyone with OCD or hoarding issues to join them.

“With OCD the ideas are taboo and the stuff it can reduce you to doing can be highly embarrassing, so if the compulsions are way out there and bizarre they are hard to talk about,” she said, “I get it, I understand and people wouldn’t need to be embarrassed. People with OCD suffer in silence. OCD is about quiet mental anguish, you are never going to seek attention or support from the people about you. But if you can’t seek attention you can at least seek solace.”

The Seek Solace OCD & hoarding support group meets fortnightly on a Wednesday evening between 7.30pm and 8.30pm at the community meeting room (behind the clothing department) in Tesco Askham Bar. There is a minimum age of 18. For more information, email rachelebailey1990@gmail.com



Rachel describes the types of OCD sufferers can experience as falling into certain categories: