r/OCD•
swissfed

Inositol, should I continue it?

So I was taking inositol for a while and I couldn't actually tell if I was getting any benefits. The thing is, it would be hard to tell how inositol affects me because my ocd can vary on its own and more importantly, my "exposures" vary for intentional reasons (when I try to push against OCD) and unintentional reasons (when I have bad luck).

Here is my background: I have had severe OCD for almost 5 years now. Before this summer I had been consistently improving for over a year (and the year before that I was pretty much the same throughout). I had some pretty good momentum when summer came around. This summer I decided to take on a lot more exposures. Some of these extra exposures were of a consistent/controlled nature, like running or cooking. And some of them were less controlled, like when I went other peoples houses or visited a college in which I didn't know what to expect. It was stressful but I felt like I could and was handling the things that came my way. I started taking inositol at very low doses around mid summer. I continued this high level of OCD exposures as I slowly upped the inositol doses. I can remember having a some more tension in at the latter half of summer but I figured as long as I'm not having big freak outs I should be ok. Then, nearing the end of summer I did start to get especially freaked about certain exposures. With one of them I had a much worse reaction than normally would, so it wasn't a good sign. I spent A LOT of time and effort on that one. I knew that I was not handling the exposures well, and that I was not rebounding well like I had been doing previously. This continued and during fall I had some really bad luck and got a few big exposures. At that point I was totally finished and my OCD was much worse than it had been for a while.

Eventually I was able to find the "assurances" that I needed to move on but it is still taking me a long time to recover. It has been about 2 month since the last major exposure but I'm still not were I was a year ago.

So back to the inositol; I stopped taking it nearly a month ago because i did not notice any benefits and it was associated with things getting worse for me (though that was probably caused by me over exerting myself).

I am considering taking inositol again and any advise would be appreciated.

TL;DR I was taking inositol for about 4 months, starting from a very low dose and reaching a high dose after about two months. When I started taking inositol things started to get worse for me, but that may well have been because I was pushing too hard against my OCD around that time. Don't know if I should take inositol.

Posted Dec 29, 2011, 4:50 AM UTC · edited

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