# Hello everybody, I'm new here.. That's my story



## Atlante (Apr 24, 2012)

Hi,my name's Federico, I'm from Italy. I've just found this website and I immediately felt better because I realized I'm not alone in my pain. This is great. I have decided to share my experience with you because I think that only people suffering from this kind of disorder can comprehend something about it and understand each other (sorry for my not perfect English - I'm making my best effort just to be understandable). When I talked about my problems to the persons I trusted such as friends, relatives or even psychiatrists(and I'm sure you know how difficult it is!), I've suddenly understand they would have never understand me completely. So here I am.

I'm not a "ordinary" guy: I suffer from OCD, pathological gambling, alcoholism, depression, anxiety, violent aggressiveness, autolesionism, dependency on drugs and I also had problems with illicit ones in the past. And - of course - I'm also affected with depersonalization disorder. I know it now, I was firstly convinced I had brain damages. The saddest thing is I'm only 21.

My family is great, they always gave me love and all I needed, but my some wroing choices and my "mad head" made my life a real hell. I was studying at university, I had a girlfriend, I was a good football striker, I could be considered an happy man. Then things went worse and all precipitated. No one understood me, no one could see my pain. I screamed alone. I went to a lot of therapists but I gave up. Then - when also depersonalization disorder came (after a panic attack during drug abuse) I decided I had to change my life.

Now I'm still up an I want to fight in order to have my serenity back. Of course all these troubles made me thought about suicide and bad things, but - remember - Hope never dies. Nothing can prevent me from dreaming of a better tomorrow, even if in this moment I'm about to cry for no real reason. Now I have a job, a lot of sincere friends and I'm going to attend university again. I take my pills regularly (Fluvoxamine and Gabapentin now), I think I have defeated a terrible OCD preventing me from going out of my room and the GAP (I have wasted many salaries). I'm not an aggressive person more, I try not to drink a lot and I don't even want to hear about marijuana, cocaine and so on. No autolesionism or violence more. So my story shows cleary that progresses can be made, I'm sure, even if they seem impossible now. We need to follow a path, the path of Hope in everyday's life. I started to believe in God, because I'm sure there must be someone to whom offer our sufferings. It can't just be all vain.

Well, now I have to face my depression and my anxiety, strongly linked with the depersonalization disorder (that I think I've had since I was 12, illicit drugs strongly increased it). Now I'm waiting to meet my new therapist, hoping in a new and valid pharmacotherapy.

Do you think is there any care for it? For depersonalization disorder I mean. When I suffered from OCD, I would never and never thought I could heal from it. But it happened! So I want to believe. I want to hope again. Remember we are special people, we are stronger than normal people, we are like angels (I'm sure we are all very clever people here), we just have to learn how to fly! I'm sure it's all linked to anxiety, it's all just a state of mind. And I think it's in the mind that we have to fight our battle against it. Drugs (medicines) can help, but we have to live our lives facing the disease day to day until the disease is beaten off. And we will forget about it. Don't let it take over, people, fight for your life! Share opinions, share emotions when you succeed in feeling them, share experiences, share your doubts! Let's help each other, surely we'll feel better. And the last thing: go out and have fun (responsibly)! Don't close yourself in your homes! Is it all a dream? Ok, let's live this dream the best we can. Never surrender my friends


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## insaticiable (Feb 23, 2010)

Wow, this was such a great post to read, thank you for writing this. I'm sorry you've had to deal with so many problems, but I have a question. How did you beat your OCD? I also suffer from OCD...the ''washing'' type. What kind of OCD did you have?


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## Atlante (Apr 24, 2012)

insaticiable said:


> Wow, this was such a great post to read, thank you for writing this. I'm sorry you've had to deal with so many problems, but I have a question. How did you beat your OCD? I also suffer from OCD...the ''washing'' type. What kind of OCD did you have?


Hi, thank you for answering me, you know it's very important for everybody to interact. I know your kind of OCD - that's a quite common one - I suppose you're scared about contamination, germs and diseases, isn't it? My OCD was very strange and different instead, I will try to explain it to you and tell you about how I got rid of it.
First of all it involved the research of symmetry and perfection in all the objects and things I saw, I mean If I had gone to somebody's house and I had seen (stupid example) some books on the table, I would have really suffered (is the verb correct?) physical pain if they weren't symmetrically placed. And this was for every thing I saw, I had to put all objects I could in order, following my idea of spacial symmetry and perfection. My desk was always perfectly and methodically tidy and so my room, everybody thought I was just a tidy boy but that was pathological and unhealty. It caused me great sufferings if objects and things in general weren't in perfect order. This was quite simple to defeat (I was also treated with Fluvoxamine 300mg/day): my therapist suggested me to put deliberately objects in a mess or not in the correct order and then to continue doing my things bearing the pain repeating myself that that were just the stupid, irrational obsessions and pulses of the OCD, until - after months of efforts - I did not care about that pursuit of perfection anymore. I'm still a tidy guy









If that was "quite" simple, the other part of my OCD was really really hard to overcome. It's a OCD's nuance very rare and personal, I don't think anybody have ever had my same symptoms.(By the way: I want to specify that the first doctor who visited me when I started get paranoid and so on told I was just depressed - after weeks of Clordemetildiazepam worthless drops, It was me to understand that the diagnosis was wrong: I suffered from OCD, that was the right one.. This because I started working in the environment of pharmaceutical companies and so I could learn something more about psychopharmacology and psychiatric diseases). My worst OCD part was the pounding need to scroll and process in the mind every single scene of my everyday life: a meeting with a friend, a look with a girl, a street scene, a particular face, a car, a dog, a sound, a music, a gag.. Everthing. Everything must be analyzed thousands and thousands of time in fear of forgetting something relevant or checking If my behaviour had been correct, If I hurted someone and so on.. I had to close myself to the outside enviroment to think about all this because every pulse from the external world would have cause me again the need of "re-processing" (so me and my psychiatrist called this OCD-related repeated action) other informations. That hell never ended: If I felt asleep without processing something, I would have to face that infos again when got up. All in the fear of having neglected or mistaked something. I hope you have understand a little of how terrible it was (it's difficult to me even to explain it in italian!), I was constantly thinking and thinking and suffering (of course I had terrible headaches) and I couldn't even speak or interact, because then I would have had to process that and I did not want to. I could not watch TV, read, go out, have fun, have rest. So I shut up and suffered (I lost a girlfriend in that period because of that - not her fault not even mine!). This was, but to tell you how I got rid of it I'd need a book, so I will try to sumarize it in a couple of world. I said to myself (always with the help of drugs and therapist): You think and re-process actions and images because you are scared of making a mistake. But you're not really. The OCD makes you think that. But I'm not the OCD. Me is me and the OCD is a sort of parassite feeding on my anxieties. So he is my enemy. I have to defeat it and If I can't submit it, at least I should estrange it. And so I did, it took me years and I'm still not perfectly healed. But the secret was to estrange it, to separate it from me and to convince myself me and the OCD were two different and incompatible things.

I hope all this could give you a little help.


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