Not Clean Enough

Forty-two-year-old Helena from Northern California has an obsessive fear of contamination.

She washed her hands about 80 times a day, she said.

"It's a very embarrassing thing. You can hide it very well," she said.

While Helena has never been trapped inside her home for months at a time, her irrational fears are disruptive, she said. She agreed to get treatment at the OCD Institute 3,000 miles away from her home, husband and daughter because in her case obsessive-compulsive disorder is keeping her from her own mother.

Six weeks after Helena traveled to Dr. Jenike's OCD Institute outside Boston for treatment, Correspondent Erin Moriarity caught up with her.

"My mom is contaminated. I don't see her that often," said Helena. "She's elderly and she wears diapers. And I just have a real hard time with that."

Helena wasn't able to even see her mother for months.

"That's one of the big reasons why I'm here. Because I want to get well so she can come to my house, and I don't have to worry about it. I don't want my daughter to not know her grandparents," Helena explained.

But getting over her fears meant Helena had to go through some agonizing exposure therapy. Her assignment was to spend the day doing exactly what she feared the most: touching things she believed were contaminated. The first stop: a grocery store.

Right away it was tough. "This is really gross," she remarked.

"Whatever people have handled the most is the scariest," she said.

Harder still was touching but not being allowed to wash her hands.

"To not wash right away is really the worst thing," Helena said. "Because I don't get the relief. I have to sit with it."

"There's a concept called habituation," said Dr. Jenike. "When you first expose someone to something they're afraid of, they're very anxious and terrified. If you stay in that scary situation long enough, that terror and fear decreases ad you habituate."

"I'm going to use the restroom, and I won't wash my hands," Helena said.

It turned out to be too tough for Helena. She rinsed her hands quickly, she revealed.

Feeling more and more confident, Helena took on an even bigger challenge: the sticky, grimy, germ-filled subway.

"It's a public place that's very dingy and disgusting down there," Helena said.

She even forced herself to shake the hand of a stranger.

After returning to the institute, Helena had to take her really dirty hands and touch everything she owned. "After a while you touch them a couple of times, they won't be so scary; they're kind of neutralized," she said.

"It's really sticky. Ewww, yuck, yuck yuck....It's all over my hair now," Helena said.

"I can smell the metal of the subway station railing. Oh, it's everywhere now," she added.

After six weeks of therapy like this at the institute, Helena was ready to face the dirty world back home.

"I have my good days and my bad days. I had a great start when I first got here," she said.

"It's a day-to-day thing for us," said her husband Mike. "It's exhausting. It consumes every minute of your day."

Early on there was a minor crisis: Helena was with her husband Mike when young Kylie opened up a box of old toys.

The mother became frozen with anxiety, convinced her daughter was now contaminated.

"She's putting it around her neck and in her hair," said Helena about a toy.

Still the anxiety was less than it used to be: She was finally able to touch her daughter.

Having come this far, Helena wanted to go see her mother but she was still not quite ready.

"She's gotten old. She's not the person she used to be. And that just makes her feel dirty to me," Helena said.

With help from Dr. Paul Munford, her local therapist, she slowly worked on reducing her anxiety: She touched a shirt of her mother's over and over again.

"I just want to keep strong and to apply what I've learned and try to not let it bother me. It shouldn't bother me. She's my mother," Helena said.

It took the fear of losing her ailing mother to finally convince Helena to fight her obsessive-compulsive disorder.

For months her obsession with germs kept her from even seeing her mother; she couldn't bear to touch her.

Finally Helena took a major step late last year.

"I haven't seen you in a long time," she told her mother.

"I know. How are you doing?" her mother greeted her.

"Miss me?" Helena asked.

"Always, always miss you," said her mother.

Helena then gave her mother a hug.

Though she may not be completely cured, Helena for one moment was able to overcome her fears.