FaceTiming her mum while on a date to check her bedroom door is closed, spending two hours in the shower, driving around roundabouts numerous times, and watching the same video on her phone for 14 hours – these are just some of the “rituals” Emily Newcombe performs as someone with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).<\/p>\n
The 32-year-old, from Barnsley, says she believes she has suffered from the condition since childhood, but was only officially diagnosed with OCD two years ago.<\/p>\n
Following that diagnosis, she says she now wants to raise awareness of the condition and the challenges it poses on a daily basis so people better understand the problems she and others like her face.<\/p>\n
Newcombe says that one of her earliest memories is of a Christmas Day as a young girl, during which she spent hours in her bedroom straightening her duvet and dolls.<\/p>\n
When a family member impatiently threw off the duvet she says she became “hysterical” for the rest of the day.<\/p>\n
Newcombe recalls that in later years, friends at school found it “strange” when she spent her lunchtime lining up planners and bags in a symmetrical line.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, relationships with partners broke down when the “masking” – hiding the disorder – became too much.<\/p>\n
“I kept it from them. I remember going on dates and lining up drinks at a bar when they went to the toilet and not being able to physically sit down at a table without straightening it,” she says.<\/p>\n
“I think it was shame really. An embarrassment. I didn’t really want them to know I was suffering,” she says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FaceTiming her mum while on a date to check her bedroom door is closed, spending two hours in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[163,85,46,522,523],"class_list":["post-465836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}