Obsessive-compulsive disorder historical perspective
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Overview
Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder. In Obsessive-compulsive disorder people have unwanted and repeated thoughts, feelings, ideas, sensations which are called obsessions, or behaviors that make them feel driven to do something which are called compulsions.
The person often carries out the tasks in order to get rid of the obsessive thoughts, but this only provides temporary relief. Not performing the obsessive rituals or tasks can cause great anxiety.
Discovery
Having unwanted thoughts and establishing repetitive type behavior were seen as symptoms of melancholia back in the 1600s. Melancholia is a severe form of depression where someone looses the ability to enjoy any aspect of life at all. During that time, when religious leaders served many roles within their local communities such as preacher, doctor and judge the main cause of melancholia was seen as something that stemmed from a lack of being a devout religious practitioner.
It wasn’t until the emerging medical community started to break out from under the umbrella of religious authority in the 19th century, that forms of neurosis began to be seen as legitimate mental health issues rather than being a problem of those who were acting as less than devout. Throughout the development of the 19th century, ideas of what compulsions and personal obsessions were became a main area of study and analysis.
The start of the 20th century brought the largest advancement in the study of obsessions and compulsions as more psychiatrists were bringing the two issues together. The two key figures in bringing OCD to the level of understanding and diagnosis that we have as a combined disorder today are Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet. Freud’s concept brought together the idea of cause and effect, meaning that it was the obsessions that created the need for the compulsions or repetitive behaviors. While Janet brought the idea forward that the cause of the obsessions stemmed from the inability of the person to use a particular type of nervous energy to complete high level mental, and so it was redirected into more primitive psychological activities such as focused obsessions and impulses.
The generic term "obsessive compulsive disorder" is not a term that was created in the traditional sense. No one person discovered ocd, but rather the term developed over the years as mental health professionals studied the various symptoms that people displayed. As psychiatrists delved deeper into the relationship between anxiety, obsessions and compulsions the basis of who discovered OCD cannot be narrowed down beyond the many who have contributed to the diagnosis. [1]
Famous Cases
Martin Luther (1483-1546), the first and most important leader of the Protestant Reformation in Europe suffered from OCD.
Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), accredited with compiling the first dictionary of the English language, suffered from a compulsion of ‘odd movements’.
Eminent evolutionist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is now also widely accepted to have suffered from OCD.
Howard Hughes (1905 -1976) is perhaps the most famous person known to have suffered with OCD in more recent times who was the twentieth century American aviator, engineer, industrialist, film producer, film director, philanthropist, and one of the wealthiest people in the world, whose story was told in the 2004 film, ‘The Aviator’.
References
- ↑ Sources used include Stanford School of Medicine and the National Institute of Mental Health.