Luke Combs details ‘debilitating' battle with rare, ‘particularly wicked' mental health condition
Luke Combs candidly detailed his battle with a rare form of OCD in a recent interview.
The country music superstar shared on '60 Minutes Australia' that he has struggled with purely obsessional obsessive-compulsive disorder, also known as Pure O, since the age of 12 but recently experienced his 'worst flare-up' in years.
'It's thoughts, essentially, that you don't want to have … and then they cause you stress, and then you're stressed out, and then the stress causes you to have more of the thoughts, and then you don't understand why you're having them, and you're trying to get rid of them, but trying to get rid of them makes you have more of them,' he explained of the 'tedious' and 'debilitating' condition.
Combs, 35, said he feels 'lucky' to be an 'expert' in Pure O since he has dealt with it for two decades and knows 'how to get out of it now.'
'When it hits, man, it can be all-consuming,' he told reporter Adam Hegarty, adding that 'a really bad flare-up' can last '45 seconds of every minute for weeks.'
The 'Forever After All' singer called the disorder 'particularly wicked,' as his intrusive thoughts are sometimes violent.
'The way to get out of it is, like, it doesn't matter what the thoughts even are. You giving any credence to what the thoughts are is, like, irrelevant and only fuels you having more of them,' he shared.
'It's learning to just go, 'It doesn't even matter what the thoughts are.' Like, I just have to accept that they're happening and then just go, 'Whatever, dude. It's happening. It's whatever.' It's weird, sucks, hate it, drives me crazy, but … the less that you worry about why you're having the thoughts, eventually they go away.'
While Pure O is not classified as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's 'Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,' Healthline says professionals use the term to distinguish it from regular OCD, which is marked by physical compulsions in addition to mental.
Combs, who also has anxiety, spoke out about his struggles in the hope of helping others with the same condition.
'I definitely want to spend some time at some point in my life doing some outreach to kids that deal with this 'cause it held me back so many times in my life,' he said.
'… It's possible to continue to live your life and be really successful and have a great family and achieve your dreams while also dealing with things that you don't want to be dealing with.'
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