OCD Can a particularly bad ocd episode cause ptsd?

[Ronin]

@Kat457, to be honest if the worst thing that happened to you is you weren't able to get off the chair, then you're rather lucky. I'm sorry that you felt paralyzed and so on, but that isn't a traumatic event as outlined in every criteria for PTSD.

Intersections in mental health / illness, happen. Often. Yes. Life's also shit, often, yes. But that doesn't make problem of one disability a founding stone of another.

 

[Chava]

didn't even know there was a criterion A. What I got out of this thread is that I probably don't have PTSD, but I do have symptoms for it, which is possible.

So the important thing is to get in contact with a good professional who can help you understand what is going on. There are MANY conditions that share symptoms with PTSD. Lots of people have spells of anger, intense irritability, totally unrelated to PTSD, but troublesome in their own right or sometimes related to something else (anxiety, depression, personality disorders, other). I've been through a period of acute stress, which was not related to ptsd but probably interacted badly with my past trauma because my body was already so exhausted. Whatever stress set the OCD in place might be the similar to the stress in the aftermath. And/or the particulars of your OCD might have set something either hibernating or new in motion.

Having a couple symptoms of PTSD doesn't mean too much because so many of those symptoms overlap with many mental illnesses...maybe half of them, depending on which symptoms you are looking at. That's why self-diagnosis isn't very helpful, especially when there is no clear "trauma" (stress, yes, but trauma seriously rearranges the nervous system...it's a biological response to extreme threat). It can be murky since I've had legitimate depression...but the defining factor in how all of my symptoms relate is the criterion A (extreme near death and fear of death a few times, and sexual assault). The criterion A is what really helps look at issues from the trauma perspective. Otherwise it doesn't make so much sense because some other important information about the source of stress might be completely missing, whether it is biological, environmental, chemical, etc.