Into the poppy fields: On being diagnosed with OCD

In recent weeks, there has been increasing controversy and debate in the Twittersphere on the merits and demerits of psychiatric and psychological “diagnoses”.

Many in the OCD online community, in particular, have been vocal about the ways in which diagnosis has been helpful to them in understanding their own minds.  Part of the journey of OCD is separating out a sense of self from internal events and external behaviours that feel deeply troubling and misaligned with who we want to be in the world. For me, as for many others, learning that we are not alone in these experiences – and understanding there are common processes of mind that drive and maintain them - has been tremendously important in healing and moving forward at times of deep distress and difficulty. As such, it can feel dismissive and minimising of our struggles when those without these challenges speak of OCD as “just a label made up by psychiatrists” or “just a series of words”.

At the same time, many others have spoken of how they have found experts putting words on their private distressing experiences to be painful, stigmatising and a destructive denial of their histories and the current contexts of their lives. What strikes me most about these debates is how often it is that the deeply human, deeply personal stories of mental health diagnosis are all too often lost in the back and forth of opinion sharing.

Today, to mark the start of OCD Awareness Week, I share and honour my recollection of the day in 2012 I finally received a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as just one experience,  just one moment in time, just one story – which I, like all others, can only tell in my own voice. 

The day I first sat in a psychiatrist's office, I wasn't entirely sure how I'd ended up there. The previous week, I'd turned my eldest son away in his buggy as I burst into tears in the midwife's office so he wouldn't see me fall to pieces, worrying even still for the baby kicking in my belly, and what my fear was doing to this little person, as yet unborn. 

The midwife didn't look up at me. She just kept writing. I'd imagine teary women are pretty much part and parcel of the everyday in that context. I walked to the receptionists window after she let me go, having never once mentioned the tears falling to the floor, and heard myself saying in a calm voice, "I need to see someone. I don't think I can go on anymore".

And yet, even as I sat in the psychiatric hospital one week on - looking at the worn carpet, staring at my shoes, tracing the lines on my finger, looking anywhere but at the man and his clipboard, his impossibly young student boring her eyes into the whole of me - I somehow expected that I would say my story, and at the end of it, would be reassured that everything would be okay. I really believed that I would be sent back out into the world feeling a little sheepish at having made such a silly fuss. It was not to be.

I sometimes catch myself wondering about that first meeting. What did I look like, sitting there, my body turned in on itself, my face revealing nothing? What did I say, not really knowing how to be myself in this strange place, stumbling over my words as  they spilled out and revealed my terror that just by having thoughts, experiencing feelings, being alive, I was contaminating and degrading the life inside me? I am unsafe, but no one believes it.

The appointment ended at 12. It was one of those beautifully fresh early Spring days - a mere hint of a breeze, the odd daffodil, swift moving cotton clouds - the kind where breathing is sweet and resonant with promise of stretching evenings all the way to Autumn.  I walked along the canal, feeling the warmth and life of the little whirling and contorting unknown person in my belly and it was all so terribly surreal.

Phrases stuck with me: "and you can ask your husband to come with you next time and review the unit if you like. Should you deteriorate further, we should have space for you and your baby, and at least in this area we are lucky to have a sister unit within an hour so you won’t have to be too far from your family in any event".

Splash. The ducklings and their mother, chasing the bread tossed by grandmother and toddler.

"Unfortunately this Trust doesn't prioritise psychological services for pregnant women, so it is likely you won't receive therapy until after your baby arrives, and it may be that things will disimprove for you as this progresses"; "it's important you know that if you don't engage fully, it can lead to obstetric complications and increases the risk of anxiety disorders in your baby". Hot shame in my cheeks, caressed by soft cool Spring wind, impersonal witness. On nearby trees, lambtails jostled gently. A couple with a dog in a jacket posed for a selfie.  Life goes on, and all of these are words. Words, words, words - swirling, surreal, solemn.  The life inside me beyond it, beneath it - or not? Maybe... harmed by it?  Only say the word and I shall be healed. Only say the word and I shall be healed. Only say the word and I shall be healed.

The air was so heavy with the weight of meaning, I could scarcely breathe it: it pooled miserably in my upper chest; my shoulders contorted and close to my ears, my palms damp and mouth dry.  Everything I had always, always promised myself would not come to our door. I am better than this. I am more than this. I will not be a statistic, I will not be the outcome of the violence and misery of my past. Wake up!

I meet my husband, Ian on cobblestones and he takes his hand in mine, as he used to at university, when we were just beginning: I haven't told him yet where I have been. We share a pizza.  The tablecloth is blue, chequered, like Dorothy’s dress. A posey of primroses sits in a small glass bowl between us.  Glasses clink around us, men and women in suits, wheeling and dealing and gossiping, a mother nearby struggling to contain a squirming toddler in a high chair, friends at the next table, talking about men, chortling, ordering wine.

Suddenly I am saying it. Aloud. For the first time. The words are mealy and sit uncomfortably in my mouth.  "They've given me a diagnosis. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder". Ian laughs, thinking it is some sort of joke. I shuffle.

There are moments when silence is the loudest thing, when the air itself feels rent by the weight of it, the strong slap of unknowing and uncertainty. Before I know it, I am pushing information leaflets across the table, explaining myself to the man who had known me since I was 19, taking on my very best professionally controlled face. "I'm still me, you know!"

Desperate short laughs, keep the gaze, reassure: heat at my collarbone, cold coursing down my back, beads of anxious sweat pearling in my palms. "I'm still me". Unsure, hollow, unconvincing. Am I? What does this even mean? Who am I? Who can I be now? The heartsink of knowing that I have not escaped history. 

I lie awake that night, and for many after, reading and re-reading leaflets on medication, the prospect of the Mother and Baby Unit looming, of becoming this mad mother whose monstrosity and misery stalks the nursery, robbing it of all light and love and colour. I am falling away from myself: and I am so very tired.

It comes to me that, beneath my feet, without me even knowing, I have sown in the soft Spring grass of my life the black seeds of the poppy: of incomprehension, of somnolescence, of hypnosis: these endless looping obsessive thoughts separating me from my own heart, my wisdom, my courage; from the bright yellow road of hope pointing to the promise of my true home. You will die here, in this sea of red. You will not make it out of this alive. This child will not live.  My broken mind churning out thought after thought after thought that I just can’t climb out of.  Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Only say the word and I shall be healed. Only say the word and I shall be healed. Only say the word and I shall be healed. Stopitstopitstopitstopitstopit! You do it to yourself, you do - and that's why it really hurts. Wake up!

Falling, falling, falling.

As I close my eyes, I startle for a moment: seeing, for the first time, what is already here, what has already been planted, what is already flourishing around and above me; scarlet, and wavering and powerful. Beautiful and Dazzling. Inescapable. I am so very tired. I shut my eyes and breathe in and out, in and out again, until the thoughts fade to black.

From: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

"They walked along listening to the singing of the brightly colored birds and looking at the lovely flowers which now became so thick that the ground was carpeted with them. There were big yellow and white and blue and purple blossoms, besides great clusters of scarlet poppies, which were so brilliant in color they almost dazzled Dorothy's eyes. "Aren't they beautiful?" the girl asked, as she breathed in the spicy scent of the bright flowers. "I suppose so," answered the Scarecrow. "When I have brains, I shall probably like them better." "If I only had a heart, I should love them," added the Tin Woodman. "I always did like flowers," said the Lion. "They seem so helpless and frail. But there are none in the forest so bright as these." They now came upon more and more of the big scarlet poppies, and fewer and fewer of the other flowers; and soon they found themselves in the midst of a great meadow of poppies. 

Now it is well known that when there are many of these flowers together their odor is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep, and if the sleeper is not carried away from the scent of the flowers, he sleeps on and on forever. 

But Dorothy did not know this, nor could she get away from the bright red flowers that were everywhere about; so presently her eyes grew heavy and she felt she must sit down to rest and to sleep."