In two hours time I must be at the psychiatrist’s office for my first visit. I am dressed and ready to go but full of anxiety. I walk back and forth in the garden, and the thought of seeing a psychiatrist scares me. The thought of telling a total stranger about my obsessive thoughts is overwhelming, and I am thinking, “What if the psychiatrist doesn’t know what is wrong with me, and when I tell him about my intrusive thoughts he thinks I am a bad person?”

My wife and my mother-in-law are watching me from a distance as I walk back and forth in the garden because I told my wife I was thinking about walking away. Now she is keeping a close eye on me. I don’t want to go to the psychiatrist. What will my family and friends say, and what if the psychiatrist thinks that I am a bad person? At the same time, somewhere in the back of my mind I do want to go. I want to know what is wrong with me because I can’t live like this anymore.

My wife went with me to the psychiatrist’s consulting room, and as I was walking into his office I somehow felt calm. He was very friendly but also very professional. He asked me some questions, but I was doing most of the talking. I wanted to get it all out in the open, so I told him everything that had happened in the last three months and didn’t spare any details. I told him about the incident with the stolen vehicle and the obsessive thoughts about going to jail and getting raped. I told him about my other intrusive thoughts, and I didn’t even care anymore what he thought of me. I just needed to put everything on the table.

I told him that if he couldn’t help me I didn’t know what else to do, and that coming to see him (a psychiatrist) had been my last option. He asked me if I knew what OCD was, and obviously my answer was no. He was trying to explain to me what Obsessive Compulsive Disorder was and was using examples to make it easier for me to understand. He used this example to explain how intrusive thoughts work: Let’s say he was sitting opposite a female and they are talking, and the next moment an intrusive thought enters his mind, “I want to touch the breast of the woman sitting opposite me.” He explained to me that a person without OCD will have the thought and won’t worry about it; their brain will forget the thought immediately. In the case of someone with OCD, the person’s brain will spend more time with the thought and will become obsessed with what the thought means. The OCD person will think it means that he is a bad person, because he is thinking these sexual thoughts, and he will be afraid that he will act on his thoughts.

The psychiatrist told me that a person with OCD will never act on his obsessive thoughts, and that was one of the first comforting things that I learned about OCD. The psychiatrist wrote me a prescription for medicine and gave me the name of a psychologist I needed to go see. He also gave me the name of a book on OCD that I could buy that would give me more information about what OCD was. He made an appointment for me to come and see him again. I was only with him for half an hour when he diagnosed me with OCD.

When I walked out of his office, I felt relieved to know that my problem was real and had a name: it was OCD. I had been diagnosed with OCD, but at the time I had no idea what it was.