Your mom is suffering from Obsessive-compulsive Disorder or
OCD. This can be a crippling disease, if not treated soon. She will need to meet with a counselor and
psychiatrist and work with both medication and therapy for any reasonable success. She needs to work with a counselor for some behavior modification program to expose her to the situations that cause obsessions and compulsions to gradually de-condition her. OCD is not a lifelong disorder and will over time reduce in intensity. Therapy hastens this process and together with the medication she can work through it better. It is related to
fear and so emotional therapy will go a long way to alleviate symptoms and the underlying causes. She needs to stay committed and remain cooperative right through the treatment. To reduce the frequency of repeated behavior patterns (compulsions) she needs to get rid of the obsessions (repeating thought patterns that are non-productive). She needs to maintain a log of regular activities and keep ticking it off of a log book and refer to the log to verify whether she has done a particular job or not. Over a period of time she can test herself to see if she remembers that she has done a particular task without listing it in the log book. Over time she can make two tasks, and so on. She will be very frustrated about her obsessions and may become irritable over small matters. So be patient and help her in this task fulfillment, and she will do fine soon. The bottom line is that there is fear and she needs to deal with that fear for all things to return to normal. In her case she is obsessing about cleanliness, which is quite common among OCD patients. Here some education and science is required to make her more sensible.
