By Austin Kang
Sometimes I think back to the waiting room. I was 13. My older brother was 17.
I remember the sharp smell of lemon disinfectant and the muffled voices behind the therapist’s office door. My brother would disappear behind that door while I sat across the room pretending to do homework, glancing at the clock every few minutes. He was my best friend and the person I admired most, yet I had no idea how to help him. I only knew that something had changed.
When I was in middle school, my brother’s Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder became severe. His perfectionism consumed his life. Homework that should’ve taken thirty minutes stretched into the night. He rewrote sentences until the paper tore, turned short-answer assignments into numerous pages, and convinced himself nothing was ever good enough to submit. Eventually, the missing assignments piled up. The brother I had always known as brilliant began struggling with school and slipped into depression.
Our family’s life revolved around OCD.
I remember one afternoon when my mom was driving me to basketball practice. Her phone buzzed. My dad had just discovered another long list of missing assignments, and without saying a word, my mom made a U-turn. Basketball no longer mattered. Like so many other days, everything stopped because my brother needed help. I never complained because I knew he needed my parents more than I did.
That became my role: the “easy child.”
People praised me for being mature and understanding, but what they saw as maturity was really silence. I stopped bringing up my own problems because they felt insignificant compared to what my brother was enduring. I declined FaceTime calls with friends because I worried they might hear yelling in the background or notice something different about my family. During dinners, I watched my food grow cold while we waited for my brother to finish one more compulsion.
Little by little, I learned to make myself smaller so I wouldn’t add more stress to my parents’
plate.
No therapist ever asked how I was doing. Each appointment focused, understandably, on helping my brother recover, but no one stopped to ask what it felt like watching someone I love go through trauma while I quietly disappeared.
Looking back, I don’t wish less attention had been given to my brother. He deserved every bit of it. I simply wish someone had recognized that OCD was affecting more than one child.
Today, I know my middle school self wasn’t alone, even if it felt like it. Through founding Behind the Scenes, North America’s first peer-led support community for OCD siblings, and meeting other siblings, I’ve learned that many of us carry the same invisible burden: loving our brother or sister deeply while quietly convincing ourselves that our own pain didn’t matter. I hope more families and clinicians begin asking siblings a simple question that I rarely heard: “How are you doing?” Being seen is the beginning of healing.
While every experience with OCD is different, far too many kids and families face the same barriers to getting answers and effective treatment. See what new IOCDF findings reveal about pediatric OCD care—and what we can do to change it—in Losing Childhood to America’s OCD Care Crisis.
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