5th ) Article on Compulsions in Mental Health: (Chapter No.05):

 (5^th ) Article on Compulsions in Mental Health: (Chapter No.05):

I did not see it because I believed them like if I believed some food in my fridge might have tampered with. I threw it out, I didn't see that as irrational or compulsion or part of mental illness because to me I was doing the rational reasonable things. I just saved my life, if I went back and checked that the door was locked or I washed my hands again or I checked the stove or all of these different things if I spent hours ruminating on whether or not. I was me again, I was saving my life, I was preventing bad things from happening. I was saving everybody around me and I saw it as totally rational and reasonable. I liked it now, it's like lots of people really like their compulsions.

So, this is an issue because back in the day in the DSM so the diagnostic and statistics, statistics manual from the associate of the American Psychiatric Association, which is where most you know when people talk about diagnoses. They're coming out of the DSM, there are some alternatives to the DSM, but particularly in North America, it's going to be the DSM. You see pretty much everywhere in the DSM. There's this thing called the distress clause. I have also started to call it the distress and privilege clause and it's in a whole bunch of the mental illness diagnosis. You will find it in there, they'll list out a bunch of symptoms and then it'll say a variation of this under several of them these symptoms must cause the individual clinically significant distress or impairment in social occupational or other important areas of functioning. So, you see what it does there basically says, like you personally need to see these as a problem.

You need to be bothered by them. You need to be troubled by them and they need to impair you, that's why I call it the privilege clause. Because, if you have lots of money, if you have lots of resources and support and access to all sorts of things, they're not going to impair you that, because you could just you know buy another or you know, say your compulsions lead to like a really messy divorce. But you have lots of money so you're like okay, well i'll just pay for it. You know if you're having to throw out tons of food, I wasn't in that situation at the time. It was costing me a lot of money to throw things away that were contaminated. I was a student, I did not have money but if somebody has a lot of money, not a big deal right. They have a lot of money and they lose their job because of compulsions. They're like, they'll convince themselves. I didn't like that job, I wanted to leave anyway, I was in the situation, where I wasn't distressed. I wasn't distressed by my compulsions and my symptoms until things got really bad.

So, this is a huge problem in mental health that we take this illness first approach like. If this was in physical fitness and physical health, this would be like saying, you do not have heart disease until you cannot move, until you're having a heart attack. You're on the floor you're clutching your chest and oh like this is now this you are distressed therefore you have an illness. So, I saw this as really problematic because so many of my compulsions were just making things worse in my life and so waiting until they were clinically diagnosable as a mental illness was like waiting until I wrecked my life but so all of this was totally preventable. That's why I find it so important that we look at compulsions much more broadly recognizing that they start with very normal things that we like doing. So, let's get into that, let's get into examples and start to explore this. We are just past the halfway mark and so, we'll look at a bunch of examples of compulsions that go all the way from normal to clinical. just take a look at, what's happening over here in the chat. Checking, if anybody has any questions on anything we've covered so far before, we get rocky on the compulsion. 

We can look at mental compulsions, you can see here right up the start one of the compulsions. I put in there is clinical like that's, a mental compulsion right. It doesn't change anything, if compulsion is mental the definition still applies. If we're checking memories, we're checking feelings in our head. We're trying to control things in our heads exact the same there's no difference between a mental compulsion and a physical compulsion. (Continued---)