Form and Content of OCD

I came across some information that I would like to share with you all, while reading a book.

The bibliography appears below.

From a doctor’s perspective, the biggest problem that people with OCD face is how much they worry about how worried they are. What really troubles them is how anxious they get about things they realize aren’t worth worrying about. When we begin to understand the extent of this mental anguish, we can begin to understand some deep truths about the relationship between a person and his or her brain.

One way to understand this relationship is to know the difference between the form of obsessive-compulsive disorder and its content. When a doctor first asks, “What exactly is bothering you?” most people with OCD say something like “I can’t stop worrying about my hands being dirty.” But a doctor who’s treated a number of persons with OCD knows that this is not the real problem. The real problem is that no matter what they do in response to what’s worrying them, the urge to check or to wash will not go away. This is what is meant by the form of OCD: Thoughts and urges that don’t really make sense keep intruding into a person’s mind in an unrelenting barrage. Together with many other brain scientists, our UCLA team believes that OCD is a brain disease, in essence a neurological problem. The thought does not go away because the brain is not working properly. So OCD is primarily a biological problem, tied to faulty chemical wiring in the brain. The form of OCD—the unrelenting intrusiveness and the fact that these thoughts keep reoccurring—is caused by a biochemical imbalance in the brain that may be genetically inherited.

The content—why one person feels something is dirty while another can’t stop worrying that the door is unlocked—may well be attributable to emotional factors in a person’s background and family circumstances, as traditionally understood by Freudian psychiatry. Whatever the reason, there is no biological explanation for why one person washes and another checks, but OCD is truly a neuropsychiatric disease: Its hallmark symptom—intrusive thoughts and worries—is almost certainly caused by a problem in the brain.

Schwartz, Jeffrey M.. Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior . HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

[cambridgeborn]

This argument can alleviate guilt that we are somehow defective in our moral character; the defect is purportedly a biological one, within the brain itself. This is important to understand, for sure. Thanks for the article.