anyone have any experience of severe OCD in an adult child?

[winterlights9876]

my daughter is 20 and has a part time
job and starting an online course next year. She's got ASD and really bad OCD. She's struggled with it since she was 12 and had CBT and therapy through camhs, privately and continually for
the last year or so. She won't take meds for
it. At the moment it's really ruling the house and it's badly effecting my mental health. She won't make food for herself and insists on me washing my hands whilst she watches before preparing food for her (very restrictive food as she don't eat a varied diet due to the ocd), won't do any housework etc as
has germ phobia and fear of vomiting which is behind the ocd. She's had the best therapy money can buy but they've never asked us to stop helping her and she's literally
sobbing and screaming and refusing
to eat if we don't wash hands a certain way before making her food. It's effecting
the whole household and driving me
mad. It's been like this for 8 years.
Does
anyone have experience of OCD with teens then adults
and does it get better? And if so, how?

I’m an adult with OCD.
With medication and CBT I had, pretty much, made a full recovery a few years ago.

The pandemic has unfortunately caused it all to flare up again. There is no way I can let anyone prepare food for me as I can’t trust that it will be prepared as I need it to be or that their hands will be as clean as I need them to be. It takes me 7 handwashes just to make myself a sandwich. Open bread…wash hands, open fridge…wash hands, open cheese…wash hands etc.

It’s exhausting and distressing. CBT only gives you coping strategies, it doesn’t deal with the cause of the issues so they are bound to reoccur. Is seeing a psychotherapist an option? It isn’t available on the nhs unfortunately so is out of reach for most of us. How does she cope in her part time job? If she isn’t in a job that needs her to wear gloves and she manages ok, then I’m wondering how it is she can’t do housework or does she work from home?

If is affecting your own MH so badly you may have to tell her that she either has to try medication or make her own food I suppose. It is horrible being like this and the distress is very real, no one chooses to have OCD but she is choosing to not try medication.

DS 18 has ASD/ADHD & also has OCD but to a lesser extent than me, although it has improved a lot the last couple of years. We do try to not give it too much focus and have always said if he’s not happy the way we have done something then he will have to do X,Y or Z himself. Who knows how he will be in the future? But I suppose that’s just what worked best for us at the time.

I know I got better in the past so I’m hopeful it will get better in the future. I know other people have made a full recovery so it can be done, maybe your daughter needs a new therapist if things aren’t improving?

A friends DD developed OCD. She is much better but the root cause was her absent Father coming in and out of her life. So she accessed therapy.

As her fear is contamination would she wear food grade disposable gloves for food prep?

I grew up with a sister with severe ocd , it was hell so I feel your pain .

Does she have any medication? I think if you can calm the anxiety then it will be better as it's all from that isn't it .

thanks for the replies everyone. She won't take medication as she has a fear of vomiting and health anxiety and terrified of the side effects of medication which always seem to include vomiting (she reads the small
print) I’ve pleaded with her to take meds.
She's having ERP (exposure response prevention) which is supposedly the gold standard treatment for ocd, but i've also thought that maybe we need to look for
a new therapist. It's covered by our health insurance thank god because we couldn't pay the £100 weekly for sessions!
It's the relentless, aggressive insistence on things being done her way (for example her feet are freezing cold and she just insisted, in tears that I wash my hands before putting the socks on as she can't touch them) She's not lazy, just terrified.

but I do think that i'm part of the problem by colluding with her. Shouldn't the therapist be encouraging her to do stuff herself or even having maybe a one off family session to
make sure we're not reinforcing the OCD by enabling it?

When DD’s OCD was driving me mad, I was told to say to her:

”I will only say this once. I do not want salmonella anymore than you do! I never chop raw chicken on the chopping board, and then raw vegetables, I am not going to cook!”

Now, she wears gloves to eat any food with a knife and fork, after work (because no amount of hand washing apparently is good enough, after handling cash at work). She even eats crisps with a knife and fork.

it's hard isn't it? How do you manage it as a family? does it affect you? My husband and I argue all the time about it. I'm pushover patient Mum and he's tough love Dad, ie he thinks we should stop doing these things and tell her to get on with it herself and if she doesn't like it, she can move out

Medication is the only thing that worked for me - also emetophobic and OCD. I went from functional but highly stressed, to really relaxed. I also feared the meds because I didn’t want to be sick, but the actual chances of vomiting are vanishingly small!

I actually called my BFF in the night when I started my meds because I thought I was going to be sick and was panicking! But it was all fine.

In a serious pinch, can you ask the GP for antiemetics for the first week of taking an SSRI/anxiety med? I called the GP for reassurance about the risk of vomiting and found it really helpful.

she's already on anti emetics to help with the emetophobia, but the psychiatrist told her about the (very very small) risk of serotonin syndrome mixing the two types of meds so that really scared her off.

Ahh fuck that nixes that then. I’m really sorry OP. As one who put my parents and loved ones through the same as you’re enduring (admittedly no fault of my own but I still feel the guilt) then I empathise with both of you. It is really awful to feel so anxious and beset by danger, and it is so bloody hard to treat. Medication was the only thing that worked for me and it has honestly been life saving. I hope that one day she comes round to the idea.

Have you ttt Rd iec the THRIVE program for emetophobia and germ issue? My sister did it and one of the things they say is NOT to enable the behaviours. They tend to have a good success rate with this type of behaviour.