He counts everything he does.

Alicia - posted on 05/31/2010 ( 1 mom has responded )

My 5 year old son was misdiagnosed with ADD, when he actually had OCD. He was on medication for ADD for almost 2 years, but I knew this was not ADD.

It all started three days before his fifth birthday, when I noticed he kept tapping his fingers on everything. He tapped the coffee table in the living room a few times, and he was counting. "One... Two Three....Four...No. One... Two... No.." I asked him what he was doing, and he seemed to ignore me. "Seth, what are you doing? Stop, Seth. Seth..." He didn't listen. He kept tapping his fingers in a pattern of one, one two, one, one two. If he messed up his pattern- he would restart.


A few days later, he was sitting at the dinner table, and he wasn't eating. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that his foods were touching. "No. Mom. No. I can't. Mom. No, I can't.. Its. Mom. Its touching." He wouldn't eat it. I had to fix his food on seperate plates. Then he ate.

I took him to a phsycologist. They examined him, and put him through several exercises. They noticed a new "ritual" that I didn't notice. He was blinking excessively. He was counting his blinks. He couldn't blink an even number of times, & he didn't blink with both eyes. He would use one eye, then the other, then both. He would do it over and over again.

They sent us home, and we waited on test results.
Seth would curl his toes and pop them, and he would fidget with his hands. He would bite his lips.
We waited almost two weeks for the test results. Seth developed a thing to where he would ask me repeatedly what I had said at any given time. He had a sudden fear of falling sick. He didn't want to go to school. He would ask me over and over to tell him things would be OK. It got exhausting.

When the test results got back, it was no surprise to me that Seth had been diagnosed with Over-compulsive disorder. I've tried flooding him into his fears, by sending him to school without answering him, I've tried taking away things for him to tap on, and putting bandaids on his fingers (This makes the tapping dull, and he has to do it over and over and over again, because its not right.) I've tried everything, and I just feel desperately hopeless.

Any suggestions, please?