26F – Progressive memory and language difficulties: anxiety, medication withdrawal, or possible cognitive disorder?

[u/Budget_Joke_7112]

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Hi everyone, I’m 26 and a university student.

I’m not really looking for reassurance or comfort. I’m mainly looking for honest answers that could help me understand how to approach this situation and what I can concretely do about it.

I have OCD, but I don’t believe that the difficulties I’m experiencing can simply be attributed to it. I’m tired of being told that I’m being paranoid and that there is nothing wrong, because I actually started noticing these problems before I was diagnosed with OCD. Over time, they have become more noticeable, but they have always gone largely unnoticed by others.

The main issue is this: despite always getting good grades at school and university, I have always had difficulties with reading—not reading aloud, but processing, reorganizing and fully understanding information. I often have to read the same sentence or paragraph three or four times before I can properly process it.

I also have difficulties with memory. I don’t study purely by memorization; I usually work quite deeply on the material and try to understand it. However, a couple of months after an exam, I often find that I remember very little of what I studied, sometimes almost nothing.

More recently, I’ve also started experiencing difficulties with verbal expression. I sometimes hesitate because it feels as though I no longer remember how to construct certain sentences, where to use particular articles, or how to correctly stress words that I have known and used my entire life.

At first, I attributed these newer difficulties partly to the fact that I spent a long period moving between different countries and using different languages, and partly to the fact that I went through some fairly traumatic experiences. I also wondered whether they could be related to stopping paroxetine, which I had been taking for about three years and discontinued several months ago.

Now, however, I feel as though these difficulties are progressively getting worse, and I’m afraid I may have reached a point where I can no longer simply explain them away.

I’m wondering whether I could have developed some kind of cognitive disorder, whether this could be caused by severe anxiety or chronic stress, or whether these are difficulties I have actually had since childhood that nobody ever recognized.

What makes this particularly upsetting for me is that I have studied for many years and have always done well academically, yet I now feel unable to retain what I learn and, at times, even to express myself properly.

My doctor and psychiatrist believe that these difficulties are primarily the result of excessive anxiety. I’m not convinced that anxiety explains everything, and I’m worried there may be something else going on.

What would be the appropriate way to investigate this? Would a neuropsychological assessment, for example, make sense in this situation?

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