Posted: Apr 19, 2016 10:00 am
Fallible wrote:The anxiety is a reaction to their obsessive thoughts, this stuff is easy to google.
OK, a good starting point. So we assume some brain chemistry. That helps, I hope.
Fallible wrote:If someone experiencing anxiety does not suffer from obsessive thoughts and compulsions, they don't have OCD.
Technically. OK. So we base it on thoughts, and not on actions taken. Imagining: Obsessive thoughts will be boring, at best and riveting at worst.
Fallible wrote:The response is to the obsessive thoughts first and foremost, and the response is the anxiety and then the compulsions intended to mitigate it or some other dreaded outcome.
Dreaded outcome? About what else could one obsess? I don't doubt there are alternatives, but we might find them silly. Believe me, I know what you're talking about, here. Now we have to explain why there isn't a rational assessment of risk in response.
Fallible wrote:The fleeting thought of strangling me to death may well not cause any anxiety to someone who either doesn't like me much or doesn't really care about me or whether they are 'mental'. The thought will come and go, like countless other, similar thoughts do. However the same thought will have far greater significance to someone who is either worried about whether they might be crazy or who does care about me, and when they get these thoughts they pay lots more attention to them and then feel so anxious about that that they must perform some ritual to make the agony go away.
That helps, but doesn't go all the way. I do know what you're talking about. I still don't understand what obviates the rational risk assessment in favor of obsessive thoughts of disaster. It's paradoxically both easy and painful to go down that road.
You don't need to guess that I favor an evidence-based approach to assessing risk. It's no mystery why this isn't universal, because understanding how to assess risk (i.e., significance) is laborious, too.