My parents told me they saw signs of ritualistic behaviour in me from the age of four. By nine, I’d been diagnosed with OCD.

Everything seemed to change after I went to a soft play party. Once I got home from that party, I took my coat off, placed it on a chair and refused to touch it again. It was like a switch flicked on in my head and I had an overwhelming fear of being contaminated.

My shrinking world

When I joined high school, the worries escalated. After school, I’d strip my school uniform off at the door and shower for hours, making sure I didn’t touch my clothes again, or the towels I’d used. I tried to separate the contamination from school from my personal space.

I ended up feeling like I couldn’t go into my bedroom and started living in a room on my own downstairs. I stopped going to school as I was so exhausted from showering until the early hours.

My world and I were shrinking – I was only 13 – and no amount of therapy or medication was helping. It was exhausting, and my anxiety was off the scale.

The road to recovery

In 2016, I was referred to the National and Specialist OCD Clinic at The Maudsley Hospital for the treatment I needed. I learned exactly what my OCD meant, and finally started to understand it as an illness, and that I could get better.

Through a form of treatment called ERP – Exposure and Response Prevention – I had to regularly expose myself to an OCD worry, regulate my anxiety, and not respond with a compulsion. It was so hard to do even the simplest things at first, like touch my mum’s hand or keep the door open of the room I was in.

In 2020, after three years of specialist treatment, I was discharged from the Maudsley with no evidence of OCD, and I got to live my life again. Now I’m studying sociology at Birmingham University and loving life. I’m proof that you can – and will – get better.”

(Sophie’s story first appeared in Metro.co.uk. Read it in full here.)