Life with an anxiety disorder during the pandemic

Rising college senior Megan Williams shares her experience living with OCD during the coronavirus pandemic. With mass media panic lending to her new OCD compulsions. "It feels now that my compulsions aren't irrational but logical." Williams writes about mental health for the University of Pittsburgh news.

Video Transcript

MEGAN WILLIAMS: You can tell your therapist, I had to lock the door six times last night. And she can say to you, how is that safer than locking the door one time? But now with coronavirus, you can say I washed my hands 10 times last night, and it is unequivocally safer than washing your hands one time.

So I was sexually assaulted when I was 15. And I developed PTSD. And then I developed OCD. I just have irrational behaviors around keeping myself safe.

So I would lock the door. Then I would have this crippling panic that I didn't lock it enough. So I would have to go down and do it several times a night.

I have to check that the gas burners are off three times after I do it. I do a lot of things three times. I'm not sure why.

And then coronavirus hit. And that immediately became the biggest threat to my safety, and to my family's safety. For over two months, actually, I didn't go anywhere. At the beginning of things, it was so hard. And so I went home and I washed my hands till they were cracked and bleeding at the knuckles, filled with this panic that I had coronavirus.

The feelings that come with OCD is that you're out of control. And you do your compulsions to regain that control, even if they're irrational. It seems now that my compulsions aren't obsessive, but that they're logical, especially when it's combined with the media telling me it's the right thing to do.

The coronavirus toes, which recently broke-- I mean, you can't look at feet longer than I looked at my own feet. For me, the compulsion becomes OK, check that you don't have this immediately. Check again. Check again. Check again, because something could change.

And so anytime we get food delivered, too, I have a ritual where I totally gloved up, wiped down all the containers that the food was in. And we'd have to throw all the containers out outside, and then dump bleach on the trash cans. I wasn't used to all these new compulsions that existed.

And I especially wasn't used to having the news influence my compulsions. I think they're the authorities on coronavirus. So why shouldn't I do this? Why should I do it 50 times, like my OCD wants me to?

I'm nervous about reopening. One of the number one things that's frustrating about having OCD during quarantine, during coronavirus, is that I can't control other people, and other people are going to be the ones to give it to me. And that is just a puzzle that is unsolvable, that I can't control what other people do, no matter how much my OCD is screaming at me to control what other people do.

I think it's important to think about people with OCD and people with other anxiety disorders, because oftentimes, our illnesses are invisible. Or it's not taken seriously, with people saying, oh, I'm so OCD. I think it's important to listen to people who actually have it. Sometimes just listening to their reasoning, hearing them out, is the number one thing that can break a loop.