Distressing condition leaves woman trapped in her room and forced to pee in a bucket
A woman who regularly stands for eight hours completing a 16-hour ‘phone ritual’ and finds bathrooms ‘overwhelming’ has a distressing condition impacting 750,000 people in the UK.
When Emily Newcombe, now 32, was six, she spent around four hours on Christmas Day perfecting the way her bedsheets and her soft plushies were arranged.
Her parents, wanting her to enjoy the special day, apparently went into her room, stripped her bed, and moved her teddies, causing her severe distress.
At the time, the Barnsley native’s family thought her undiagnosed perfectionism OCD, also known as ‘just right’ OCD was a phase.
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However, their opinions changed when they noticed their daughter was increasingly late for school as she needed to fiddle with blinds, arrange her book bag, and make sure her coloured folders were in the correct order.
Teachers reportedly picked up on Newcombe’s behaviour, which later caused her to lose friends who deemed her acts, such as lining up Coca-Cola bottles on nights out, ‘strange’.
In September 2024, her mental health symptoms worsened to a point where she found the bathroom ‘too overwhelming’, forcing her to forgo showering and start peeing in a bucket outside.
She alsobecame trapped in her room and had 90 debilitating daily rituals, including religiously dressing and undressing, going around roundabouts in her car five times, and repeatedly unplugging her seatbelt.
“I never expected my OCD to get as bad as it did, it was so upsetting and distressing,” she confessed.
Newcombe was hospitalised in September 2024 for 12 weeks of intense cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), with doctors calling hers the ‘worst case’ of perfectionist OCD that they had seen in over a decade.
It's believed that 12 in every 1,000 people in the UK have a form of OCD.
Despite the therapy, the woman continued to experience intense symptoms in January 2025, including a daily 16-hour ‘phone ritual’ which sees her standing in one position measuring certain items for up to eight hours at a time.
“I feel a compulsion to press certain buttons on my phone until it feels right, but it doesn’t feel right, so it takes me hours on end,” she confessed.
Earlier this year, the Brit met with Professor David Veale, a consultant psychiatrist at Nightingale Hospital, London and internationally renowned in the fields of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The expert recommended exposure response prevention (ERP) treatment, a practice that confronts thoughts, images, objects, and situations that may provoke obsessions, as per the International OCD Foundation.
“They would probably take my phone off me, to stop the phone ritual, and make me do things that feel wrong to me, to train my brain to think I’m doing them right," she said.
However, as the therapy can privately cost up to £4,000 a week, it is not something that she can apparently afford right now.
OCD UK has more information about NHS Specialist OCD Treatment Services, including adult, child and adolescent services.
Topics: Mental Health, Health, Real Life
Ella Scott