The Man Who Couldn't Stop

To resist a compulsion with willpower alone is to hold back an avalanche by melting the snow with a candle. It just keeps coming and coming and coming.

People who live with OCD drag a metal sea anchor around. Obsession is a break, a source of drag, not a badge of creativity, a mark of genius or an inconvenient side effect of some greater function.

It felt good to say those things out loud. It was a relief to free them from my head and expose them to the light.

Officially, it is no more possible to be a little bit OCD than it is to be a little bit pregnant or a little bit dead.

An average person can have four thousand thoughts a day, and not all of them are useful or rational.

People who live with OCD drag a mental sea anchor around. Obsession is a brake, a source of drag, not a badge of creativity, a mark of genius or an inconvenient side effect of some greater function.

Mind over matter represents the triumph of will over physical hindrance. Our thoughts are our weapon against the world.

Some people with OCD are compelled to pick up pieces of broken glass from the street. They worry that, if they don’t, then someone else might cut themselves on the glass. If the person with OCD fails to prevent that happening, they think, well I may as well have walked up to the stranger and deliberately hurt them. So they take

I knew what I had to do. I had to ignore the thoughts, resist the compulsion, let the anxiety build, and then let it decay to extinction all over again.

Reassurance, like offence, is taken not given.

Freud, who spoke German, used the term zwangsneurose (obsessional neurosis). The word zwang was translated as ‘obsession’ in London, but ‘compulsion’ in New York. Faced with confusion, scientists introduced the hybrid term ‘obsessive-compulsive’, a label subsequently given to millions of people, as a compromise.