Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Essay

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a condition many may not know about, but it has recently become an area of more interest between scientist and people today. OCD is mainly an anxiety disorder, which can be described as having persistent, reoccurring, and uncontrollable obsessions and compulsions that become time consuming. “Obsessions are intrusive, recurrent, and persistent unwanted thoughts, images, or impulses that are experienced as unacceptable, upsetting, and uncontrollable, and they usually give rise to subjective resistance.”(ProQuest) OCD can also lead to extreme distress in the daily lives of the people who have the condition.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder not only means having constant obsessions, but it also means having compulsions
“The disorders known to have obsessional features are Lesch-Nyhaus Syndrome, anorexia nervosa, mental retardation, organic brain syndrome, epilepsy, head trauma, Parkinson’s Disease, depression, schizophrenia, and Tourette’s Syndrome.”(Samuel M. Turner, Deborah C. Beidel, and R. Swami Nathan, 431). To start off, people with schizophrenia experience delusional thoughts as well as hallucinations; these are considered to be obsessions. Now when it comes to OCD and its relation to people with Tourette’s disorder, the symptoms are prominent. According to the article Biological Factors in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, many reports have indicated that obsessive-compulsive do occur within 33%-89% of patients who deal with Tourette’s syndrome. Even though OCD and Tourette’s do correlate with one another, there are differences in the behaviors of the two. People who suffer from Tourette’s have uncontrollable body movements such as tics, as well as uncontrollable noises like screaming or grunting. However this is different form suffers of OCD since behaviors that are related to OCD are not just limited to a certain type of body movement and are related to an obsessive ideation. Also, certain rituals that are related to Obsessive-compulsive disorder usually serve a purpose, such as someone washing their hands constantly to avoid infection or disease. However, these people who suffer with Tourette’s and the high association with OCD symptoms is important in the views in neurochemical differentiation. Depression is also a disorder that is also related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, both are often experienced together. “Gittleson (1966) reviewed the case histories of 398 patients with a diagnosis of psychotic depression. Thirty-one percent of the cases exhibited obsessional thoughts during the depressive episode. Kendal and Discipio (1970) reported high scores on the