I am never going to miss the agonizing feeling of germs lingering on my hands at night, keeping me wide awake.
It’s been a year since I was diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). However, this unsettling sensation crept up on me as early as 2024, beginning with the lingering worry about grease staying on my hands. It eventually progressed into hours-long anxiety spikes: from meticulously checking if I had stepped on pet droppings on my way to school, to contemplating whether I had been exposed to a harmful virus on the walk home.
What used to be a single cycle of cleaning to reassure myself devolved into endless rounds of checking for dirt, just to calm the thoughts latched onto my brain like an inseparable adhesive. It took a Saturday afternoon of these suffocating feelings stacked together for me to finally confess, in tears, to my parents that I needed help.
Everyone knows how notoriously difficult it is to find reliable mental health support in this country. It’s even more difficult for individuals who require extensive exposure therapy and guidance beyond an hour-long session. The numbers speak for themselves: as of 2024, the Philippines counted only 1,821 mental health care specialists for a population of over 100 million, with existing centers often backlogged for months. This was something I experienced firsthand, as my search for a therapist led me to clinics and doctors that either had a six-month wait time or an initial consultation priced at P21,000—a price tag that gatekeeps healing behind economic privilege.
While low-cost avenues do exist—such as the Philippine General Hospital’s psychiatry department and the National Center for Mental Health among them—more often than not the state-run system is buckling under the weight of demand. Struggling individuals do not pursue them precisely because of queuing delays, and instead seek treatments in the private sector, where they are nickel-and-dimed for every minute of care.
At one point, I had to settle for a psychiatrist who barely scratched the surface in a 15-minute session, asking little about my experiences before sending me off with nothing but a suggestion to start medication. While I didn’t suspect malice initially, I realized that medication alone, with no behavioral therapy to follow, was only ever going to be half the answer.
Cultural support systems for OCD are also rare, even in circles of friends. However, it’s difficult to fault them, as the disorder is still broadly reduced to that condition which compels people to be organized and clean. The reality is far more complex, with some variants being the very antithesis of the assumption above. Some subtypes involve persistent hoarding, whereas others, like the “Pure O” variant, are defined almost entirely by distressing intrusive thoughts with no physical compulsions. Then there is the subtype I have, Contamination OCD, which is characterized by a persistent fear of being harmed through perceived sources of germs or bacteria.
What people rarely understand when it comes to OCD is the toll it takes on your capacity to simply function. Yes, it made me clean—obsessively so—but it was first and foremost a debilitating force that slowly dragged me out of my own life, away from the people around me, away from the present. Knowing and acknowledging something was wrong did little to help. Telling myself it wasn’t serious did even less. It never went away, even after a mental fight.
Perhaps the rudimentary starting point is getting people to realize that OCD is not about repeatedly switching the lights on or off or keeping a tidy desk, because that understanding, as simple as it sounds, carries real weight.
I’m fortunate. A year after my diagnosis, I’m better. But better is not the same as normal, and normal is not something I can fully claim yet. For the estimated two percent of Filipinos living with OCD, the distance between better and normal is a path, the start of which many are still struggling to find. Understanding the condition is one way we can make that road a little shorter for them.
I wouldn’t wish OCD on my worst enemy, and I mean that in the most literal sense. It is not a quirk or a punchline. It is not something you can logic your way out of or simply decide to stop. It is relentless and brutal. Until more Filipinos can access the care they need to combat OCD, too many people will keep facing it with nothing but their own exhausted willpower to lean on.