Cry For Help

This page explores the question: ‘Could OCD be understood as a cry for help from the body?’

To answer this question properly, we first need to look at how mental illness is usually defined.

One simple definition is that it involves persistent irrational thoughts from the subconscious mind that create distress. OCD fits this description very clearly.

However, when we call OCD a mental illness, it can sound as if the subconscious mind is simply malfunctioning. In the short run, OCD certainly behaves like a mental illness.

But I don’t believe the subconscious is malfunctioning — I believe it’s reacting to something. I explain this idea in more detail below.

With mental illness, you would expect random thoughts and feelings. But, with OCD, the thoughts aren’t random — the content is meaningless, but the thoughts serve a purpose. That purpose is to signal that your body is overwhelmed by stress or trauma.

To signal this, the subconscious starts by sending one intrusive thought, and if that fails, it then produces an additional one, sometimes more than one.

If that still doesn’t work then it could change the person’s beliefs. If that fails, then it could produce psychosomatic symptoms or get the person to associate an OCD thought with an object or area.

This escalation process shows that the subconscious is acting intelligently. It cannot directly tell you that there is too much stress or trauma in the body, so it must use indirect ways of signalling this to you — which is exactly what the escalation steps above are.

So OCD isn’t the mind breaking down, as it can often feel — it’s the body calling for help through the subconscious. It almost always emerges when the body is under too much stress or trauma.

Therefore, OCD can be seen as a cry for help from the body.

So, is OCD a mental illness or a cry for help?

I would argue that, overall, it’s a cry for help. But in the short run, it behaves like a mental illness, because that is the only way the subconscious can signal that something deeper needs attention. Therefore, in the short run, you still need to use tools that reduce the immediate symptoms, such as ERP (CBT) or mindfulness.

The important thing is that, even though it behaves like a mental illness in the short term, your mind is not broken. Your mind is functioning as it should — even if it doesn’t feel that way.

The advantage of treating it as a cry for help in the long run is that it encourages you to look for the underlying causes of the condition.

The next page looks at whether OCD is part of a wider trend - please click the below button