Ep21 - When Your OCD Is About Your Faith

If you’ve listened to some of our previous episodes, you’ll know that obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a really difficult mental illness to live with – and it’s more prevalent than most of us realise.

OCD is made up of intrusive thoughts that you can’t control around a particular issue–that’s the “obsession”–and those thoughts cause an incredible amount of anxiety unless you complete a certain action you feel compelled to do–that’s the “compulsive” part. Within the family of OCD, there are a number of different subtypes.

But what if your OCD is about your faith?

This episode we’re chatting to Mary, a young woman in the UK who has religious OCD or “scrupulosity”, a type where the obsession and intrusive thoughts are all focused around religion and faith. Having grown up in a Christian family, this has been a difficult journey for Mary.

For Mary and others suffering with the religious type of OCD, their intrusive thoughts are focused on questions such as whether God is real, and if the Bible can be trusted. While these are questions that we might all ask during our faith journeys, for those with religious OCD, these thoughts are persistent and inescapable.

Today, Mary shares with us what it’s like to have your mental illness constantly making you question your faith–or even if your family members are actually the devil in disguise–and she also talks us through her journey of finding the right support and treatment for a type of OCD that wasn’t as widely known when she first sought help.

Mary’s story is an incredible testimony of what it means to trust God, even when your mind is bombarding you with intrusive thoughts about whether or not He’s real. It’s a reminder for all of us that faith and doubt can coexist, and that God meets us right where we are.

Mary has also written more of her story in a blog post called, ‘I Wish I’d Known It Was Religious OCD’.