The New OCD Generation

It’s one of the most debilitating and misunderstood mental conditions and used to be rare among children – now it hits one in 100. Teens reveal how their lives are dictated by obsessive compulsive disorder

EVER since she can remember Alisha Gregg has been “a worrier”. As a small child she’d sleep on her bedroom floor because she feared if she got too comfortable on her mattress and fell into a deep sleep, she might attack a member of her family. At primary school she worried she’d broken rules and routinely confessed to misdemeanours teachers said she couldn’t possibly have committed.

By the time she was 15 her fear of hurting someone had mushroomed to include friends and random strangers. She remembers walking across the bridge to school in her native Belfast, Northern Ireland, consumed with anxiety that she might push her friends, one by one, over the edge into the water below. These images were so vivid and terrible she could picture their bodies being pulled from the river, the faces of the people who witnessed her commit this crime and the stigma that would hang over her forever afterwards.

“I was convinced I was this horrendous person. I felt shame for all the thoughts I was having and hid them from everyone,” Alisha says. Even her mother had little idea what was going on beyond the fact her daughter seemed to be more punctilious than the average teenager.

“I thought I was the only person in the world like this.”

After a school assembly talk on the importance of exam timetables, she began devising schedules, at first for the month ahead, plotting when she would be at school and what she’d do at home. She believed that as long as she stuck to these targets she wouldn’t harm anyone. Then it occurred to her that the rhythms of each week were different, so she started a second weekly plan. Within months this had evolved into a third schedule to cover each day. Soon she had to allow a quarter of her waking hours to schedule the schedules.