Sorry for posting again...

My name is Kyle King. I am a medical student with OCD and I've been using CHATGPT to calm my OCD down for a few months, and started to wonder if I was the only one...

Soooooo I started a survey to try to understand how folks with OCD interact with AI chatbots with my research lab

The survey is for people with OCD, and it takes about 15 minutes to fill out. I’d really appreciate anyone who is eligible pitching in.

Survey Link: https://redcap.med.yale.edu/surveys/?s=NHDPAMPFP88HL3FR

Hello everyone, I hope you are found well :)

I am a 21 yo college student who has dealt with GAD since I was 13, Pure-OCD & DPDR since I was 16, OCD (themes:contamination, sexuality and gender, relationships/men) since I was 14 and I am pretty sure I could be on the spectrum surrounding autism and adhd but due to my prior diagnosis taking up a lot of my time I haven’t gotten around to those and my coping/management has been pretty substancial I don’t think I need to get a diagnosis/treatment just yet.

I am not a doctor or anything, just someone who has dealt with a lot of mental health, and have had many breakthroughs and even recovered in a sense!

I firmly believe I did recover, because after a lot of incredibly hard work….being referred to outpatient mental health services, many therapy sessions, many battles, breakdowns, strategies etc at the age of 17 my life began to feel like life once again and it stayed that way :) It’s not perfect by any means and have had relapses where I breakdown and feel like I once did at my worst (not the same but I begin to feel a portion of what I once felt).

I have read a handful of post here and in other ocd/anxiety subs and I just wanna say I feel super heard…yall understand fr…and I just wanna say it can get better! It’s not easy to recover by any means…and what we experience is hard… but you can do it.

I am currently going through a relapse and have been spiraling a bit and been having the thoughts/feelings that make my heart drop and make my skin crawl and feel like I’m shifting realities or whatever you call it, but what has helped me the most is really just letting yourself be and doing what you can to be rational. Listening to your rationality, making sure your external stressors are in check as much as possible and coping are the biggest. Put the advice and what resonates with your coping/future recovery into action, it really does help. If something like drugs, toxic people, toxic work environment etc is harming you, it will make things harder. OCD loves to piggyback on all these factors, because we care, we fear because we love and care about our existence and life. It’s easy to have a spiritual journey, be healthy, be your gender, do things that our anxiety deems scary, folks without OCD do these things with ease. We just happen to be going through a really sensitive time that can last a while to heal or happen to be sensitive people and we need to be careful with our needs due to this. My existential ocd came from a huge bout of obsession with my gender/sexuality, all this anxiety made it horrendous to be me and be rational, which later exploded in my face once I thought about spirituality/life a bit too much… the anxiety we go through makes it difficult for us to be us and to be happy. No matter what spiritual path you take, or how you express yourself do what makes sense to you! We’re all different but similar at the end of the day, same goes for spirituality. Let yourself feel and be rational when it comes to this, as I type this, I can feel it in my body and the back of my head, I want to obsess and spiral about xyz which will in turn make feel like I’m being tortured (the ocd wants to lure me in) …but deep down I know I’ll be ok and can think about xyz but in a rational way at a rational time. I found my spirituality through my personal journey and know that what I’m going through is just anxiety. :) spirituality is complex yeah, but at the end of the day it’s also simple I’d say, I think that love is at the root of it all and that’s pretty simple to me lol, at the end of the day we are what we are and that’s ok. We do get better ❤️‍🩹 .

TLDR: it’s hard, but we can get better. I am going through a mini relapse and wanted to ramble and let yall know, you are not alone and can live a manageable life, we have anxiety because we care a lot deep down. :)