Medication has been proven to be very helpful in the treatment of OCD, but it is a very individual thing. What may be a miracle drug for one person will be almost completely useless to another. However… medicine is not a permanent cure for OCD – you often only feel better whilst you’re still popping those crazy pills.
So, is medication a crutch? Yeah, I guess that it is in some ways. Okay, so there’s the argument that it is there to correct a chemical imbalance (which I totally subscribe to – I’m much more comfortable with this model than the psychoanalytical one) but people can and do recover from OCD without. But what’s wrong with a crutch? I’ve just come out of plaster and although I could have walked around on my broken foot, it would have taken much longer to heal and been more painful – and the same is true with taking the medication for OCD.
It is certainly not week to accept help of the pharmacological kind - psychotropics are not "stress -reducers;" they correct genuine disorders. Far from being a sign of weakness, it takes a certain degree of strength to admit that you have an illness that may need medication. Is there any sense in struggling through CBT, putting yourself through hellish levels of anxiety when there is something available that will make it all just that little bit easier?
In the end it is a personal decision – some will decide that they can make it alone (and I’m very impressed by those who do, but please don’t try to push me to mimic your bravery) and others, like me, will decide that we need that crutch for a while. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Honest.
Obsessively compulsively yours
Bellsie
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