Treating OCD without medication

Hi there, I went 7-8 years without medication and finally at the start of 2025 i knew I was very unwell and needed to start. I have been on Citalopram since January. I started on 20mg, shortly changed to 30mg and feeling not much difference I felt as though the medication was not going to work for me. After speaking to my mental health nurse we decided to go onto the maximum dose of 40mg. I be honest for the first month or 2 I was a mess, my symptoms were so severe and I was very depressed. I felt like nothing was going to help me but, I have learnt that medication takes a long time to settle. In the last couple weeks I am finally seeing a difference with the medication helping. Sometimes u need to push urself to stay on them through the pain and then once it starts to settle you will see a difference x

Keep trying! I can only speak from personal experience but the OCD always wants me to stop my meds.

Hi! Sounds exhausting and I hope you find something that works for you. Due to a chronic-kidney thing I had to stop my OCD meds and just “hung in there” for a while. Then, reluctantly I found NoCD and tried ERP. ERP is hard and also worth it. Is my ocd cured ? Nope! Am I leaned to deal with it and handle it, yup. Tbh ideally I’d do meds and ERP but sans kidney it’s not an option. And tho I was reluctant to try ERP and it’s not a cure, I’ll admit it has had a positive impact and made daily-life much easier. Best of luck. None of it is easy, but anything is possible.

I have worked on my HOCD previously by myself (which is long and time consuming and hard af- because I didn’t know it was OCD and I was scared to learn about it) without medication, I healed myself. I started to understand the noise and thoughts were simply that and they started to slowly go away. Sometimes I still get the thoughts, and I’m like hmm how do I feel, but I try to be like “ idc anymore lol, the thought is a thought, nothing more, and i don’t need to reassess” that helped a lot and just constantly going out. I didn’t realize I was doing something like ERP until recently. I put myself in fitness classes with sexes I was scared of and went out and did things and made friends with the same sex. It was hard at first because I didn’t understand it well, but knowing you have OCD and getting help, I can imagine is being so much easier than what I went though. Now I’m dealing with ruminations of EOCD. I am not as scared as I was the first time I had my first OCD breakout because it’s just a thought and I got over it once, who is stopping me from trying again. I am going to start therapy so I can learn to cope in the future if something else pops up. Just know you can do this. My bf once told me I am like a dog on a leash behind held, but I am also holding the leash and I realized that is so true. You must choose yourself and choose hope and faith and help and you will get better. I believe in you, whatever you end up choosing to do, you will survive and flourish! When you are feeling like butt cheeks, choose to live the life you wish you could live if you weren’t ill. I lost my sense of hobbies, but even though I’m not super interested in doing them, I am trying to pick them up so I feel better because it’s something I wish I wanted to do, and I start doing it and I’m like wait I do doing this still! I just lacked motivation. You have lived already so long and done so much, you know you can succeed! (Sorry for the rant, I just feel like I don’t see a lot of conversations about OCD without medication and it made me feel like I had to get on them to be better, but that is your choice)