You too, when you were a child, you had to walk exclusively on the white stripes of the pedestrian crossing, otherwise you thought that something was going to happen to you? I do. But as we grew up, those thoughts went away. Not at Clara’s. Quite the contrary. The 17-year-old high school student lives daily with disturbing, repetitive and uncontrollable thoughts, which are called obsessions, and which generate significant anxiety in her. So to reduce her anxiety, she performs repetitive, irrational and uncontrollable gestures. In short, she has OCD.
“I count my steps, I count how many times I chew when I eat […] I tell myself that if I don’t do it, people around me will die. “Since the fifth, she suffers from TOC of counting, to which have been added more recently contamination TOC. Clara is afraid of being dirty, of getting sick. So she no longer wants to touch the door handles, even of her apartment. “I can no longer leave my house without being accompanied by my mother or by someone, so that this person opens the doors for me because there are some that I consider to be contaminated. »
Clara decided to testify in front of the camera to tell her daily life handicapped by her OCD, in this seventh and last episode of “My head and me”, the series of 20 minutes on mental health.
Clara’s video testimony can be found at the top of this article.