Long showers.....

[Guest guest]

Re:

> My daughter who is 10 has the issues with showering. it takes her 30

minutes just to get in the shower. then when finally in she takes a

good 30 to 40 minutes use to be 20 minutes. we use to time her and

pull her out after 30 min. it was terrible she would turn into deamon

child screaming, yelling, and hitting at me. we would have to fight

with getting the bar of soap and wash rag out of the shower - jennifer

I was told that trouble starting and stopping things is classis OCD. I

had an adult patient (I'm a psychiatric nurse)who really demonstrated

this for me:

We were trying to figure out how to support her. One staff told her

to go all day without washing her hands, which she did, but she

told me that was easy. What was hard was getting herself to start

washing her hands and then getting herself to stop. She didn't want

to start for fear she wouldn't do it right and had trouble stopping

for fear she hadn't done it right. She was able to agree to start a

shower at a certain time and stop regardless when time was up (she

kept track of the time herself.

She was a mature adult who had very good insight into her illness but

had experienced acute difficulty due to stress in her life at this

time. I imagine it took a good amount of time and perhaps medication

to reach her current stage.

One thing I've seen, having an OCD child, is how little I and the

other professionals I know know about this illness. While I don't see

many patients hospitilized for OCD, I think a number of them may be

struggling because they have this disorder and don't know it.

I'm sure your daughter will get the help she needs and gain insight.

Remembering you, Elaine