The hellish side of handwashing: how coronavirus is affecting people with OCD

Boris Johnson does it while singing Happy Birthday twice. For Jacob Rees-Mogg, it’s the national anthem. And as soap supplies run low, it seems much of Britain is following their example and heeding the official guidance to wash hands thoroughly and often, in order to minimise the spread of the coronavirus.

It is good public health advice, of course. Indeed, one question raised by the rush for soap is just what all those people without any in the house did before. But for some people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), to be warned they must scrub to protect themselves from an invisible enemy, and to do so in a ritualistic way with internal musical accompaniment, is akin to inviting a demon to come for tea. Some of these people have spent years trying not to wash their hands, often as a prescribed part of their treatment.


“It’s definitely put a lot of the internal OCD dialogue back into my life. It’s being reinforced by outside, authoritative voices,” says Erica (not her real name), a long-term OCD patient. “It’s a lot harder to tell yourself that the urge to wash your hands is irrational when everyone on your Twitter feed or on the news is saying: ‘Wash your hands. Nobody is washing their hands correctly.’”

The worsening outbreak affects people with OCD in other ways, too. Chiefly, the spike in anxiety about the virus can fuel existing obsessive fears of contamination and trigger destructive compulsive actions. For some people with OCD, coronavirus can become all they think about. “I have seen three patients this week whose OCD has started to focus on coronavirus,” says David Veale, a consultant psychiatrist at the Priory hospital in London. “It is a challenging time for people who have OCD.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/13/why-regular-handwashing-can-be-bad-advice-for-patients