Responsibility OCD Ruined My Life

Amélie Padfield
Jul 16
5 min read

Updated: Jul 21

What happens when you believe you need to keep everyone safe?

Trigger warning: This article contatins mentions of suicidal ideation.

I’m on hold to the local police; I don’t know what I’m going to say this time. It’s the third time I’ve rung them this week, and I know that it’s not going to go well. But I also know that however painful and embarrassing this call is, it won’t be worse than living with the guilt of letting someone die.

This was me when my Responsibility OCD got so bad that I lost all sense of reality and perspective. I was trapped in a nightmarish cycle. My whole existence revolved around keeping people safe.

Responsibility OCD is a theme of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. OCD is a serious anxiety-related condition where people experience frequent distressing and intrusive obsessional thoughts, which often lead to compulsions—repetitive mental or physical actions that are done to relieve the anxiety of the obsessions.

With Responsibility OCD, sufferers believe they are responsible for preventing others from coming to harm. Obsessions and compulsions focus on a heightened sense of responsibility for people and situations.

Living with OCD

I have suffered with OCD for as long as I can remember. As a child I experienced the more commonly known OCD themes like contamination, checking, and harm. Throughout this time of my life I managed to keep my compulsions hidden, and although they affected me greatly, I was still able to function in the outside world.

As I got older, I started experiencing intrusive thoughts about harming my family, and when I started driving, OCD made me believe that I had continuously knocked people over.

I would spend hours of my life walking up and down busy main roads to check that I hadn’t harmed anyone. I would review the local news to make sure no one had been the victim of a hit-and-run. My OCD was becoming harder to manage and to keep secret. I was constantly exhausted, mentally and physically, but there was a lot worse to come.

Inflated responsibility

Inflated responsibility is a common belief in people with OCD, and with all the OCD themes that I experienced, my main fear was acting irresponsibly and hurting someone. At some point, however, my OCD shifted into something much more sinister and frightening, as my fear of being responsible for everyone’s welfare completely overwhelmed me.

Soon, everywhere I went I saw risk. If there was a tiny spot of water on the floor of a supermarket, I would panic that if I didn’t wipe it up someone would slip, crack their head open and die—and it would be my fault. If I didn’t kick a stone off the pavement, someone could trip and injure themselves. Often, I would attempt to reduce the risk of someone coming to harm. I would move heavy things from the edge of supermarket shelves and monitor the magazine area in case there were inserts that people could slip on. Everyday activities, like shopping or going for a walk, became the stuff of nightmares.

I was working in a retail position at this time, and here too I was constantly concerned for the safety of customers. I was even following them around if I thought they had hurt themselves, asking them if they were ok. This became so bad that I was unable to do my job properly as I was fixated on whether customers were coming to harm. Eventually, after months of torturing myself with guilt, I had no option but to leave.

My OCD became even more distressing, because I started having visual and auditory hallucinations of the things I feared the most. I would see people lying on the floor, injured because of my neglect. I would see blood on customers in the shop. It felt like I was living in a horror film.

All around me, everywhere I turned, there were hazards and dangers. Each situation left me consumed with guilt, which stayed with me for weeks if I was lucky and months if I was not. I lived my life in a state of fear, worried that I had let someone die by not reporting something. My mind was filled constantly with visions of people bleeding to death or drowning—and it was all my fault. I had hundreds of deaths on my conscience every day.

This is what hell looks like

The guilt I felt for abandoning injured people became too much for me and the only way I felt I could relieve that guilt was to ring the police. I started ringing the non-emergency line multiple times a week.

“There’s a man on a bridge looking sad and I’m worried about him” I would say, or “I’m sure that swimmer didn’t get out of the water, you need to check he’s ok”.

The confused operator of course wanted evidence and I was never 100 % sure, so the call would end in me feeling embarrassed and confused. I would often ring back, compelled to seek more and more reassurance as I worried that I had left crucial details out.

One time, I rang the police because I thought I heard the cries of an injured person outside my flat. In the early hours of the morning, I lay in bed terrified as I heard footsteps and then saw the beam of the police officer’s flashlight as it scanned the block of flats. Of course, nothing was found, because, as usual, nothing was there. I felt terrible for wasting their time, but I would have felt guiltier if I hadn’t called them. The ‘what if’ question that OCD asks is a cruel feature of the condition.

I couldn’t live like this anymore. I could see no way out of this horrific trap that I was in. There were many times I contemplated suicide to escape the guilt of being a negligent person who had let someone die. I didn’t see a way out.

Breaking the cycle

I needed an intervention urgently. My therapist suggested that I emailed him any concerns I had about people and I would never know what he did with the information.

This wasn’t the conventional way to deal with OCD and we both knew that. But something drastic needed to happen, and this way I wasn’t calling the police all the time which was making me severely ill.

It did break the cycle and slowly the gap between me getting urges to contact the police got bigger, and the distress I felt over situations I saw lessened enough for me to start leaving my flat without feeling huge amounts of panic.

OCD still plays a big part in my life, but it doesn’t rule me like it once did. I am more aware of my triggers like stress and tiredness, and I try not to indulge my hyper-vigilant nature.

It’s not easy though, and I often have very difficult relapses, but when I challenge the OCD and make small gains, it empowers me to not give into it. I never say never when it comes to my OCD and I know it will always be a part of who I am, but I am gradually finding a way through.

This article has been sponsored by the Psychiatry Research Trust, who are dedicated to supporting young scientists in their groundbreaking research efforts within the field of mental health. If you wish to support their work, please consider donating.