OCD Severe fear of schizophrenia, long post please help

That won't do any good, because many people end up with a very powerful association-related fear and panic buildup associated with it, so researching it would just feed the fire since severity is not important to them.

I'm glad it seems to have helped you, but I can't recommend it to anyone else.

I understand your opinion bendib. I know about the association-related fear and panic buildup associated with it but I believe that it would eventually pass. I just wanted to offer some kind of advice for people to follow if they wanted to since this illness phobia does not seem to be addressed by mental health practioners, and no techniques exist (that I am aware of) to deal with this phobia. Someone else over at yahoo answers forums recommended doing the same thing. He goes by the name of MadMac, he says

"To rid yourself of the fear of becoming schizophrenic study the disease to become familiar with its symptoms and get to know a few people who are schizophrenic. One way of doing the latter is to go to a forum where schizophrenics converse in support of one another like, http://www.intervoiceonline.org or the "voice hearers" group of Yahoo! groups. You will find they are not much different than the so called normal person. Knowing all there is is to know about the disease (and not the abysmal public misperceptions of it) helps to dispel anxiety.

To familiarize your self with the symptoms enter "schizophrenia" into a Yahoo! web search where a number of explanatory links comes up. Wikipedia has a good summary."

I think this is good advice and at least it is something people can try to help rid themselves of this illness phobia, instead of suffering and having no strategies to use.

Another strategy or procedure is called "the Antidote". I got this from an article a psychiatrist named Stephen Phillipson wrote. Here is a link to it http://www.ocdonline.com/#!thinking-the-unthinkable/c1arh He is an expert in treating more rare forms of OCD like Pure-O. This is how he explains the antidote procedure. (by the way, the "spike" just means the point in which you feel the anxiety, right before any kind of compulsion)

The Antidote:​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
The spike often presents itself as a paramount question or disastrous scenario. A response that answers the spike in a way that leaves ambiguity is sometimes warranted. "If I don't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday my mother will die of cancer!" Using the antidote procedure, a cognitive response would be one in which the subject accepts this possibility and is willing to take the risk of his mother dying of cancer or the question recurring for eternity. No effort is expended in directly answering the question in an effort to find resolution. In another example, the spike would be, "Maybe I said something offensive to my boss yesterday." A recommended response would be, "Maybe I did. I'll live with the possibility and take the risk he'll fire me tomorrow." Using this procedure, it is imperative that the distinction be made between the therapeutic response and rumination. The therapeutic response does not seek to answer the question but to accept the uncertainty of the unsolved dilemma.

So to apply this to the fear of having or getting schizophrenia you would accept the possibility that you might have schizophrenia, and that you might get it sometime in the future. I believe that I did do this after doing research about schizophrenia. I didn't know about this procedure at the time but I guess I came up with the idea on my own, and it really did help.