ocd meet the internet

OCD meet the Internet

February 1st 2016

For this blog post, we have a great piece by Bowen Zheng that covers his experiences with OCD and his very own project to help OCD sufferers. (The links to his site and Facebook are at the bottom of this article)

OCD, meet The Internet

I was diagnosed on a sunny day in San Francisco, California. I should be at school that day. It’s a Thursday of November 2013, four days after I had my meltdown at my aunt’s house. My fear of contaminants and intrusive thoughts from my school had made me unable to function at all. OCD may beat me once in the past, but with the right help from the Internet and support from people all over the world, you can regain the control of your own life sooner.

“Fear doesn’t shut you down; it wakes you up” Author Veronica Roth said in her book Divergent.

I’m not an author, I’m an OCD sufferer. My name is Bowen. I’m 17 and I’ve suffered from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder for over 5 years now. I had to give up my dream, my school, my hobbies and more to this horrific yet underrated disease. Thus as I recover, I decided to use the experiences I have with technology to help others suffering from the same disease or any other mental illnesses.

Before my OCD changed my life, I was a young iOS programmer who had spoken several times at events including TEDx. There was even a piece about me on Forbes China. But when my OCD started to take over me, I had to give up everything just to become mentally well.

Albert Pine once said “what we do for ourselves, dies with us. But what we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.” The current issue with the way major mental health foundation

The current issue with the way major mental health foundation is that they don’t use the power of the Internet to the full extent. Often, they have websites with hideous design and few online events. Indeed, you can say they focus more on offline and local events but this is the 21st century, and we are able to access information from all over the world. An event to help mental health patients should not be limited by the size of a venue, city or even country. So that’s why I started OCD Acceptance. Using my programming and technology skills, I’m taking the advantage of Internet to help as many people out there as I can. I started the website with daily memes. A ‘Meme’ is this new type of media that is basically a photo with a caption on it. They are simple and easy to understand but sometimes can have tremendous power. Working hard by myself, I update daily with new memes about OCD. There are over 220 memes on our website now in just over a year. That’s just incredible.

In addition to that, I added several new sections to the website recently. With Friend Blogs, you can find the best blogs about OCD from all over the Internet. And we collected an 8-page long resource on everything that’s related to OCD, categorized for you to search. I still remember the day my dad spent hours online trying to find everything we could learn about this disease simply because the information was so scattered. These two new additions are my hope to serve as a guide for families that’s being affected by OCD. I asked myself, what’s the most demanded need of an OCD suffer or their loved ones. I found the answer being how to get in touch with professionals and advocates. By hosting online live events, I invite the best OCD professionals and advocates from all over the world to share their stories, perspectives and suggestions about how to live with OCD. Furthermore, patients and their family can ask questions at the end of each talk to exchange thoughts with our speakers. It’s like an OCD conference, except free and it happens twice a month. I was so lucky when I met the other three members of the team scattered on the east coast of United States. Despite our distance from each other, we still managed to run the OCD Acceptance website and Facebook page well. This is a great demonstration of the power of the Internet, connecting all of us together in a seamless way.

As I move forward, I’m seeking for more people to be on the team and work with us, no matter what kind of the mental illnesses they represent. The Internet gives us the power to work together, regardless of country, ethnicity and whatever we are suffering from, we need to catch this opportunity and start to have more coalitions against the global burden of mental illnesses. Obviously, there’s a dark side of everything, same with the Internet. I don’t want to talk about the negative impact Internet has on us because I believe some of you’ve already experienced it, more than I did. But people are fundamentally good, as long as you can discover it. Find an online support group, better if there are active professionals in it. But please consider avoiding the super-sized support groups on Facebook cause they are usually too crowded and things like harassments happen. Choose the normal size groups, like ones from 100 to less than 1000 members. See if they are active with new conversations and members. Since most of these groups are secret groups, if you need further information on them, please check our website and Facebook page, or simply message us and we will usually reply within an hour. Life with OCD is hard, opportunities few, challenges many. Believe me, I understand. With OCD Acceptance, I really hope that the hard work we are doing today, can make you suffer less tomorrow.

Bowen ZHENG

Founder, OCD Acceptance

https://www.facebook.com/ocdacceptance/

http://ocdacceptance.com

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