OCD includes uncontrollable obsessions. They are recurring thoughts or impulses that are intrusive or inappropriate and cause you anxiety; for example, coming into connection with dirt, germs, or "unclean" objects, doubts about locking doors or turning off machines or appliances, extreme orderliness, or aggressive impulses or thoughts. Compulsions can also be involved. Compulsions are repetitive behaviors; for example, cleaning your house constantly, washing your hands repeatedly, or showering many times a day.
In both cases, you understand your actions are excessive and unreasonable but youre unable to stop them. Compulsions include be haviors like checking several or even hundreds of times daily to make sure your stove is turned off or your doors are locked.
Repeating a name, phrase, or action again and again also qualifies as a compulsion, as does taking an excessively slow and methodical method of daily activities so that you spend hours organizing and arranging objects, or hoarding them. Hoarders are unable to throw away useless items, such as old newspapers, junk mail, even broken appliances. When hoarding reaches epic proportions, whole rooms could be filled with saved items.
OCD usually starts gradually, usually in adolescence or early adulthood. Unlike adults, kids with OCD do not realize that their obsessions and compulsions are excessive. To be diagnosed with this disorder, your obsessions and/or compulsions must take up at least one hour every day and hinder normal routines (for example, if you cant make left turns when driving), occupational functioning, social activities, or relationships. You may feel the need to avoid certain situations. If you are obsessed with cleanliness, you may not be able to use public rest rooms.
Contact with traumas, especially life-threatening ones, such as a serious accident, a natural disaster, war, or witnessing the death (or threat of death) of some other person, or being assaulted can result in PTSD when the aftermath from the experience interferes with daily functioning. Common symptoms include avoiding activities, situations, people, and/or conversations linked to the event.
Responses to trauma can include feelings of intense fear, helplessness, and/or horror, reexperiencing the big event in thought or recurrent dreams, numbness and loss of interest in surroundings (detachment), wherewithal to sleep, anxious feelings, being easily startled, irritability, angry outbursts, extreme vigilance, along with a sense that your life opportunities have shrunk.
PTSD may appear at any age, although older adults rarely contain it. Young children who have a break down trauma may have nightmares, relive the big event through play, and complain of headaches and stomachaches. Symptoms usually occur between three and six months after the trauma. In some cases, especially when the trauma is simply too terrible to allow into awareness, it may be years before symptoms appear.
For these sufferers, symptoms are often triggered by the an niversary from the trauma or through the experience of another traumatic event. For PTSD to become diagnosed, your symptoms must be present for more than a month and must result in decreased ability to work, socialize, and participate in other areas of daily functioning.
If you have an intense fear and embarrassment in social or performance situations, you may be suffering from social phobia. If this sounds like the case, you may be acutely aware of the physical signs of your anxiety (blushing, palpitations, tremors, sweating, diarrhea, confusion) and worry that others will notice, judge them, and think poorly individuals. This kind of anxiety can lead to a panic attack when you are faced with a social situation or avoidance from the activity altogether.
If you suffer from social phobia, you tend to be sensitive to criticism and rejection, have difficulty asserting yourself, and are afflicted by low self-esteem. Common situations that bring out social phobia are performance related.
Start of social phobia is mid-to-late adolescence, but children could also exhibit symptoms. In childhood, the condition includes excessive shyness, clinging behavior, tantrums, mutism, decline in school performance, and avoidance of school and social activities with peers.
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