New to ocd

[Anon123]

Basically I have been suffering with anxiety for a long time. I would always get thoughts about harm coming to my family and catsrophic event so would spend hours a day on the internet trying to find a way to protect them. I spent a long time in constant fear with these obsessional thoughts. My anxiety then changed into having to text family members to make sure they were not dead as I would have horrible images of them dying. Other example have been checking the weather as feat or being struck by lightning or the same with the news as I has images of my family being bombed so checked to make sure they would be okay. In the last year my anxiety has changed to health fears from autism to septisima and most recently luekemia . I spend hours a day on the internet researching, checking my hands to calm my anxiety ( irrational I know) or checking my body for rashes or bruises. I have panic attacks and have times that I completely break down in fear. Today I saw my therapist who says I have OCD but that they are not going to dignosis me as they don't want me to be labeled. I am now confused if I have OCD? Do my symptoms point towards it or was my therapist wrong?

[Sunflower2]

Ocd is just a branch of anxiety, so the diagnosis isn't really that important as they are all treated in similar ways. I'd have been given every diagnosis under the sun related to anxiety and depression if my therapist had outright told me all that I had! But that doesn't really help you get better as it can be counter productive being labelled with various disorders! I couldn't tell you if it's right or a wrong diagnosis, but your therapist does have a lot of experience in this so I'd probably trust them!

But, you can have obsessive thoughts with any anxiety disorder, you could be agoraphobic cause of ocd, you could have panic attacks cause of a phobia rather than panic disorder, you could have an eating disorder which is actually ocd, they all overlap a bit really so the name isn't the important part!