My sister has obsessive compulsive disorder. She's had it since she was in middle school. Or at least that's when we caught it and had her evaluated by a counselor who sent her to be evaluated by several psychiatrists who all agreed that my sister had this mental illness. She was sent to behavioral therapy and managed to cope on her own and found ways around it without having to default to medication. However it did start to get significantly worse as she got older and she refused medication because she thought it would alter and harm her personality and make her too mentally unstable to live her life/kill brain cells/prevent pregnancy/cause diabetes etc.
When she turned 20 she got married and very soon after her marriage she got pregnant. She had a healthy baby girl and all was well, until the OCD began to manifest in the worst ways. It was literal mental torment for her. She finally gathered up her courage and sought out medication to manage the problem, sees a therapist once a week, and also still attends behavioral therapy to try and overcome it. So far we've seen success. She's become a better mother and she figured out that the medication won't harm her as long as she takes the prescribed amount and discusses any changes with her doctor.
To give you an idea of how bad it gets, she does a ritualistic thing where she smells everything in the refrigerator and pantry to smell if the food has gone bad. She has an idea that rabies is dormant inside of her and is cautious of animals and prays before touching them even though she isn't religious. If she clips her nails, she does it in a weird order and swears that the number 10 is evil and won't leave the house on the tenth of any month. In October, she's convinced she'll get sick if she doesn't drink a glass of orange juice every morning. etc. Always fears getting extremely sick. Not suicidal, but fears that the power to kill herself is within her. Has the thought that she could be capable of discovering immortality.
So these seem to be excessive, but they come and go. Otherwise she's normal, funny, quirky and pretty. She's also a redditor and she's super fun to be around.
She happens to live in the town where I would like to attend college. I went to stay with her during a weekend event so I could check it out and see how campus life was. That was this past weekend. I arrived on Friday and stayed in the baby's room with her. So anyways her husband is a pretty cool guy. He's in the military and his personality can be a little overbearing at times. Like her, he's attractive and quirky. He isn't very smart and has a hard time doing things or making decisions on his own. She guides him and while the dynamic is strange to me it works for them. Rarely do they have problems, and if they do nobody hears about those problems.
The only thing I can pinpoint as a dislike I have towards my brother in law is that he constantly tries too hard to be the funny guy. He just isn't. And one of the things he thinks is funniest is joking at her expense. That's the only way I know how to word it. He isn't trying to be cruel, he just doesn't know how to chill out sometimes. Like if she's doing her refrigerator thing he'll pick something up and take a giant whiff out of it and be super dramatic about it and laugh and close the fridge and tell her the food is fine. If she feels like she's sick he'll be like "oh no you're dying time to go dig a grave in the backyard". And while she usually laughs it off to be nice and acts like it doesn't bother her... I know it does. She's my sister. She lived with me. We weren't into perpetuating her fears but we would make sure to reassure her that everything was going to be okay and never joked about her condition. To me, he's disrespecting her and not being very thoughtful about what she's going through.
So anyways I'm typing this because Sunday before I left we had lunch that he made. He made it in foil packs and my sister hates aluminum foil. She picked the food off and arranged it on her plate and sat down to eat it. She inspected it carefully to make sure nothing was in the food and then began to eat. After the first bite of potato she coughed a little and said, "I feel like I just swallowed foil. What do I do? What if I swallowed foil?" He turned around with this serious look on his face and said, "I might have to drive you to the ER. Let me know if you can't breathe and start coughing up blood."
She. Panicked. She burst into tears and dropped the fork. The baby got upset too and he came over to console her and she smacked the plate off the table and yelled "Don't touch me" and ran upstairs and locked herself in her room. I felt everything was awkward so I wrapped up my pack and took it on the road and drove home. I gave it a day but checked up on her via phone call today. Apparently, she hasn't left the room except to watch the baby and use the bathroom. She's hardcore monitoring herself and coughing intentionally to check for blood. My brother in law removed his facebook on Monday so there's no way of contacting him. She won't listen to reassurance that she's fine and imagining that she swallowed foil and convinced she's dead walking.
What in the hell do I do? I haven't told my parents yet who will be really sad/upset to find out it got this bad. I don't know if it even is my place to go help my older sister. But I really don't want to watch her life fall apart because she isn't mentally sound. And her damn husband should know better and I feel that he doesn't realize how bad it is and needs to be sternly spoken to so that we can avoid future episodes because he's screwing with her head.
Help?
tl;dr: OCD sister was eating lunch and felt she swallowed something unsafe. Husband jokingly suggested she was dying and it legit freaked her out and now she's having an ongoing non-stop reaction to it that has her in a dark place mentally right now. Husband needs to lay off making shit worse, and I don't know what to do to help.
Submitted November 25, 2015 at 10:27AM by ocdthrow902 http://ift.tt/1P7UDuu relationships
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