How does someone develop OCD
As we said in Section 2, the experience of having unwanted, intrusive thoughts are very common. The question is therefore why for some people this gets out of hand and becomes so troublesome. Research is still at an early stage but there seem to be a number of answers to this question.
First, it appears that people with OCD may simply be more likely to become tense and anxious than most people are. So any upsetting experience may be worse for them than for someone else.
Second, people with OCD often have extremely high standards, particularly in the areas of morality and responsibility. This means that a thought which someone else would just shrug off is extremely distasteful or unacceptable to the person with OCD. Third, we know that upsetting thoughts become worse at times of stress. OCD often begins at such times, especially if it involves coping with extra responsibility (for example around puberty, when starting a new job or when having children. After OCD has begun, it usually gets worse if the person is under any kind of stress. Finally, we know that people find worries harder to control when they are very distressed. The result of all these effects is that people with OCD become very distressed when they have certain thoughts. This distress then actually makes it harder to just dismiss the thoughts, as someone else might. Thus people with OCD, trapped between severe worries and their inability to control them, look for some other way to cope. They tend to develop 'rituals.'
