Hi everyone,

I've been with my current boyfriend for over 4 years, and I know that he's had OCD since he was a teenager - I think from about 14-years-old. We are both 22 and university students.

Lately our relationship problems have become more and more severe. He's become controlling, manipulative, emotionally abusive and aggressive. He starts fights over nothing, little things like asking him not to do something will set him off and cause fighting for hours. He thinks about things obsessively and when I went away with my family for a few days he worked himself up into such a state that he went absolutely insane at me about it for days on end. When he's mad he often comes out with completely irrational accusations or things he's mad about that make absolutely no sense to me. He calls me names as "jokes" and then gets mad at me when I get upset. He resents me because we aren't getting along and after he's treated me badly complains when I don't want to be intimate with him and tells me I'm no fun to be around.

Reading this over it makes me feel weak that I'm even still in a relationship that's going this way, but it's not usually like this and we've been together for so long that I feel like if I just wait it out things will get back to normal. If I can stand to do that (and I'm not sure yet that I can) I need some advice in coping with it and dealing with it, how to respond, what to do etc. It's so hard even writing about this, I feel completely isolated and that I have no one I can talk to. I'm not sure the way he's behaving is typical of OCD, but I've read that it often goes in hand with other mental illnesses. He has no rituals that I'm aware of, but I think when he was younger it had to do with contamination stuff.

I know that he's on Anafranil (he tells me it's for other health problems but I've looked up the drug and I'm sure it's a lie, it seems to be for OCD) but the most I've ever seen him take is one per day. He refuses to go back to his psychologist or even a GP, despite both me and his parents asking him to. He says the way he acts has nothing to do with his OCD, that he's just upset.

I would really appreciate any advice in coping with his behaviour and how to act when he begins to work himself up with obsessive thinking. I'm prone to anxiety myself and I'm feeling very anxious and depressed right now. I feel like everything I've built over the past four years has been blown apart by him acting this way in a matter of weeks. I don't understand what's set it all off or what to do.