How to cope when your child has OCD

Hygiene is another common obsession among kids with OCD. Sara, 43, who was diagnosed with OCD as a child and prescribed mild sleeping pills, washed her hands so much they cracked and bled. "I imagined my mum was trying to poison me with the pills she gave me," she says.

Sara's anxieties date as far back as she can remember. She recalls at the age of about eight or nine, descending  barefoot to the cold basement several times a night looking for a bomb she was convinced she had planted that would obliterate her parents.

Some more OCD obsessions
Numbers and counting are also typical OCD obsessions. Sophie, now 19, has had anxieties related to numbers since she was 12. "Everything had to be an odd number for me," she says. "I couldn't get in a car if the volume of the stereo was an even number on the dial." Sophie's parents took her to a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with depression and OCD and put her on the antidepressant fluoxetine (Prozac). Today, seven years later, she has learned to control many of her compulsions but can't seem to control others no matter how hard she tries. "When a friend is giving me a lift somewhere, I still try and sneak the radio to an odd-numbered volume reading on the dial."

Laura, from Montreal, now in her early 30s, also has had an obsession with counting that dates back to her childhood. "Teachers would tell my parents that I was always daydreaming but the truth is, I was counting things in class. I would count the four sides of the classroom door over and over again. I would count the corners of the classroom ceiling or the number of desks. It always had to amount to an even number. That would go on for the whole day, every day, even though I logically knew the results of my counting."

Today, Laura takes citalopram (Celexa, another antidepressant) but it doesn't completely control her urge to count. 'At night when I'm in my bed, watching TV, I count the same objects in my room over and over again. I get lost in my counting and have to force myself out of it to be able to watch TV, only to restart again after a few minutes."

OCD and hoarding
Hoarding is yet another OCD behaviour. Remember the large squares of fabric my daughter Tessa wanted to hang on her walls? I finally discovered what they were really for: Tessa had been filling pretty boxes, gift bags and plastic bags with hair clips, dried flowers, exercise books, diaries, drawings, tags from clothing, business cards, lace, ribbon, toys, clothing and candy. She stored them in her closet and under her bed, and when every location was bursting, she started covering it with pretty material. We had tried to clean out those boxes before, but every piece was connected to some memory, and she thought if she threw out the item, she would lose the memory forever.

Tessa's behaviour – and that of Sara, Laura and Sophie – is not all that uncommon. Up to four per cent of children under 18 have OCD, leading Christopher Cameron, a psychologist with Mental Health and Addictions Services in Calgary, to claim in a recent paper that "OCD is an extremely common form of child and adolescent psychopathology."

Childhood is when OCD typically begins. It starts as early as preschool, says Dr. Michael A. Jenike, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston. About one-third to one-half of adults with OCD developed the disorder in childhood.

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