Just right OCD - a few questions...

May 19, 2012

I joined this group a while back and mostly read posts. I feel that I am a

little too new to all of this to be very knowledgeable or helpful! My heart goes

out to each and everyone one of you dealing with this insidious disorder.

My daughter (8) seemed to develop OCD this past fall overnight after starting

second grade, though she has always been a complicated child This has been a

very eye opening year for us. After a litany of diagnoses over the years, she

was ultimately dx with combination type ADHD and more recently, OCD. We seem to

have the ADHD fairly well controlled with Intuniv, and she has been taking

Celexa since October for OCD. We recently did some psychoeducational testing

done with the same psychologist she sees for her OCD. We were shocked to hear

that her Full Scale IQ came back at 150 and all of her achievement testing put

her between 4-7 grade. I don't know if, in your expeience, there is a

correlation between high intelligence and OCD?

In all of the reading I have done (including the workbooks we do together) OCD

has been described as an Anxiety Based (what if) disorder. We don't have

that...at all. There doesn't seem to be any anxiety attached to the

compulsions. She is not and never has been a worrier in any sense of the word.

Only, in her words, " it starts to feel like an emergency if she tries to not do

what OCD wants her to do. Is this typical? In the beginning, she did a lot of

weird walking (counting cracks, looking for colors on the path - her school is

tiled and was a total nightmare for her). She also had many rituals surrounding

making her body feel equal,ie. blowing/sucking air out of one side of her mouth

then needing to the other, touching her right leg and then left in the same

spot, etc. After we started celexa, these things went away, but after a few

months she started cracking and pulling on her hands and feet (and wanting to do

other people's hands and feet to, which I pitched a fit about and she dropped).

The hand wringing the therapist told us to live with - that it wasn't hurting

anybody, but it seemed to just get worse and worse, and then she confided in my

that she had started having the urge to rub her teeth on her desk at school - so

we decided to up her level of celexa and now those behaviors seem to be waning.

Does the celexa stop working? Is it realistic to think we can keep her on it

long term? I'm afraid that if we try to stamp out all the behaviors, new ones

will just emerge that could be worse.

I'm just confused because it seems like most of the OCD I hear about is much

different than our experience. Any insight? Thanks, Nanci

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