Posted by SLS on January 31, 2012, at 6:51:04
In reply to best med or therapy for rumination?, posted by JohnLA on January 30, 2012, at 20:06:00
Clomipramine (Anafranil)
How do you know that your ruminations are a symptom of OCD rather than depression?
- Scott
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http://www.anxietycare.org.uk/docs/ocdcarers.asp
What is the difference between obsession and rumination?These two descriptions of thought are often used as if they mean the same thing, technically they do not. Ruminations (or morbid preoccupations) are usually experienced by people who are depressed. They are thoughts that seem to stick in the head and go round and round with no solution. They are usually about activity in the past that the depressed person views as having a profound meaning in terms of his or her current value as a person. The depression makes poor interpretations of these facts and their meaning a real problem to the sufferer. These ruminations will almost invariably be about real happenings and mistakes in the past, albeit with a severe discolouration caused by the depression. So they will make sense to the ruminator even as they cause unhappiness. An outsider too might see such thoughts as having a rational if seriously over valued basis.
Obsessional thought, on the other hand, is mostly about current or future activity or activity in the immediate past and usually involves unrealistic fears. These might be of having inadvertently run somebody over or accidentally poisoning someone; or committing some grossly antisocial or illegal offence while out of control or distracted in some way. They too might take up a great deal of thinking time.
Anxiety Care has encountered people with both OCD and depression where the difference is hard, or impossible, to see. For example, endlessly thinking about cheating on ones income taxes ten years ago might be viewed as depressive rumination on the subject of being a dishonest person; but when this slips over into fears that the Inland Revenue and the police will come knocking on the door, does this make it an irrational belief and therefore an obsession? And if obsessional thinking requires a compulsion to neutralise it, does reassurance-seeking by endlessly talking to ones partner about the income tax problem constitute obsessive behaviour or the relief of excessive worry, and therefore make the problem more in the Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) area?
Some see things as they are and ask why.
I dream of things that never were and ask why not.- George Bernard Shaw
poster:SLS
thread:1008804
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20120120/msgs/1008876.html