Cursed by the most excruciating obsession of them all
Rose is bright, beautiful and a talented writer. But, as a new TV drama reveals, she’s battled a shaming OCD: imagining EVERYONE naked – or having sex
‘Just telling my story has been profound therapy’ ‘It was terrifying. I thought I must be depraved’
TO meet Rose Cartwright, you’d never guess at the hidden torment that sometimes plays on repeat in her mind. Young and chic, she has the cool, confident vibe of a woman comfortable in her own skin.
Yet when she walks down the street, a mental image of her knees exploding often pops inexplicably into her brain. When she enters a building, she obsesses about it collapsing on top of her. And the more Rose tries to ignore such obsessions, the stronger they become.
But they are, at least, bearable compared with the intrusive X-rated thoughts which ran on a loop in her head for a decade from the age of 15.
every teenager thinks about sex, right? Well, imagine for a second a world where you can’t stop yourself mentally undressing your friends, the bus driver, your boss, the Prime minister or even a priest.
Picture a landscape where the most innocent of objects or situations triggers an inappropriate or disgusting sexual thought; when you look at someone’s face, or cliffs at the seaside, all you see are genitalia.
‘It feels like a torture — that’s exactly what it is,’ says Rose, a 33-year-old writer. ‘It’s relentless. When I was 15 it was literally from the moment I opened my eyes to the moment I went to sleep. It takes over your life and a lot of people like me feel they can’t carry on. I feel very lucky that I was able to come back from the brink and live to tell the tale.’
that tale was first told in Rose’s remarkably honest and darkly comic 2015 memoir Pure, about her experience of living with Pure Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). It is now the inspiration behind C4’s controversial new comedy drama, Pure.
Pure O refers to a form of OCD in which obsessions manifest as intrusive, unwanted, inappropriate thoughts, impulses or mental images — often acts considered taboo, be they sexual, violent or murderous — without the outward signs of compulsion such as hand-washing or checking, which are commonly associated with the disorder.
For sufferers it can be a nightmarish, secretive existence, filled with self-loathing and doubt. For Rose, bringing the condition out into the open has been a healing, if uncomfortable, experience.
Certainly the six-part tV series scene opener is not easily forgotten. the drama’s heroine, 24-year-old marnie — the character inspired by Rose — is giving a speech at her parents’ surprise wedding anniversary party when it all goes horribly wrong.
From nowhere, unwanted images of the guests stripped of their clothes and sexual inhibition flood her brain as she desperately glugs champagne in an attempt to block them out.
Revolted by the imaginary orgy in her head, involving both her parents, marnie flees to London to seek answers to whatever is wrong with her. Let’s just say that what happens next does not make for comfortable family viewing.
Rose admits it was a ‘huge concern’ how viewers might react to the disturbing sexual element of the drama. there are some who, outraged, have dismissed it as ‘soft porn’. But to Rose, it’s an accurate description of what life is like for her and for fellow sufferers.
‘It’s a nuanced and difficult story to tell,’ she says. ‘I always knew it could be interpreted like that, even though it hasn’t been done in a pornographic or titillating way, but nothing quite prepares you for some of the abuse you receive.
‘I’ve had some people send me messages telling me I’m a crazy b***h, or they’ve sent me pictures of their genitals. Others tell me they’ve been having intrusive thoughts about me. It’s disturbing.
‘But more importantly, I’m getting messages every single day, pretty much every hour, from people saying “thank you, I feel less weird, less alone”. So all the misunderstanding pales in comparison to that.
‘OCD is well documented as being one of the most debilitating mental health conditions because it’s so all-consuming, and I wrote my memoir as I refused to be ashamed of it any more.’
Why she developed Pure O is still a mystery to Rose, but she believes her ‘hypersensitive’ and anxious nature left her vulnerable to over-thinking and ‘obsessing about all the things society is obsessed with’.
Indeed, Rose fears for today’s generation of teens who, glued to their smartphones, are reported to be suffering record levels of anxiety.
the youngest of four children, two boys and two girls, hers was a happy childhood, growing up in the West midlands. Before they retired, her French mother was a language teacher and her father used to work in the media.
‘When I was very little, the Bosnian and Kosovan wars were on the news constantly and I developed an early shade of OCD,’ says Rose.
‘I’d worry my Dad and brothers would get taken away to fight in the wars. People with OCD are very porous, very spongey; we soak it in. We have anxious brains looking for something to attach itself to.’
Rose was 15 when, one evening, seated at the dinner table with her family, ‘the mental image of a naked child entered my head and the corners of my world folded in’.
In her memoir, Rose writes: ‘I turned the topsoil of my mind for an answer about what the image meant, but the possibilities made me dizzy. the more I tried to stop thinking about it, the quicker it flickered.
‘I mouthed the words “What if I am a paedo?” And with that question I was sucked inside my head, where I spent the next decade, fretting at the unanswerable like a fly on a lamp.’
‘It was horrifying, terrifying and absolutely revolting to me,’ says Rose now. ‘I was 15 and had a virgin’s imagination, so looking back, the thoughts were quite naïve and not very graphic.
‘But you think that if you have an intrusive thought of a kid with no clothes on, you must be depraved. I thought I was the only person in the world who had these thoughts.
‘I remember doing my GCSes and having these thoughts literally every minute and feeling this dread. the horror and the guilt. It felt as if I’d killed someone, hidden their body in the garden, and it was going to get discovered at any moment. that was the level of nightmarishness.’
Rose believes that the naked child image was triggered by anxiety over what she heard on the tV news, dominated at that time by the murders of ten-year-old schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, Cambridgeshire in 2002.
She also believes the intrusive sexual thoughts spiked at a time when curious adolescents are swamped by sexual images in music videos, film, entertainment, internet and the media.
Frightened by her inability to let go of unwanted thoughts, Rose coped as best she could by distracting herself with obsessive academic study.
She gained eight A* and two A grade GCSes, achieving the highest english grade in the country, followed by three As in english, History and French at A-Level, winning a place at Leeds University to read english.
‘Looking back, I don’t know how I got through it,’ she says. ‘Your mind is always telling you that you are the worst kind of person imaginable. I’m not religious but I would pray “Please God, make this stop right away”.
‘I tried to make it stop but nothing worked. I just studied, studied, studied because that’s the one thing I could control.’
Her parents, aware of her anxiety, were acutely worried. Rose went to her GP but was too embarrassed to go into detail. She was prescribed antidepressants but found they did nothing to stop the thoughts.
‘I was having intrusive sexual thoughts of every kind, about men and women. I wondered if I might be gay or having an identity crisis.
‘to test myself, I compulsively tried to bring about situations where I got off with a girl — a scene which occurs in the C4 show — but I never had sex with a woman and it didn’t happen.’
Attracted to men, Rose, who is single, says her OCD had a devastating effect on intimate relationships.
‘the thoughts were so wall-to-wall, it’s as if there’s a screen in front of your face which distances you from the moment when you want to feel most connected,’ she says
Rose saw a psychotherapist at university, who was ‘very kind’ but did not have the knowledge of OCD to offer ways to manage the condition. Indeed, Rose had to retake a year at university because her OCD was so crippling.
It was only when, aged 23, she read about Pure O on the internet and recognised the symptoms exactly mirrored her own. It would be another three years before Rose found a therapist who could help. By then, she
was 26, working as a commercial writer in the media industry and had hit ‘rock bottom.’ She’d fallen in love, but intrusive thoughts were wrecking her new relationship.
Then, a ‘pinnacle’ moment in her career, when she met actor Jake Gyllenhaal at a video shoot, ended in despair. As she looked at the star’s face, all she could see were disgusting, sexual images.
‘I remember thinking “I am failing so hard at being a young person, at being happy”. The glamour of that night — what should have been — just highlighted the failure. There was no fun, no joy in my life.
‘I’d met a new man, who I loved, and I really wanted to build something with this guy. But the more I tried to grasp at that, the more intrusive my thoughts became.
‘I thought, “God, now it’s stopping me from having what I want more than anything in the world”. I sank into a depression over the course of six months, self-harming, wanting to climb out of my skin, unable to tolerate the feeling of anxiety.’
Rose, who had split up from her boyfriend, was now desperate for help. She found a therapist in New York who specialised in OCD and paid thousands from her £23,000 annual salary for £100-atime sessions via Skype.
The ‘exposure’ therapy, which involved watching hours of porn among other things, seemed counter-intuitive to begin with, but it appears to have brought about, if not a cure, then a way to manage and lessen such thoughts to end the ‘vicious cycle spinning’.
‘Porn, for the most part, is made by men, for men, and it’s often not very pleasant to watch, but the therapist said, “Look, the content of your thoughts is pornographic. You’re trying to escape that.
‘I want you to sit and watch 30 seconds and, if it makes you anxious, I want you to sit in that anxiety and tolerate it.”
‘Instead of running away or ruminating, I had to let the thoughts wash over me and not fight them. In this way, you expose yourself to the contents of your fears until they lose power over you. If you sit there and tolerate your thoughts and anxiety, you no longer give them any weight.
‘But just telling my story has been a profound therapy. Writing about something that was hidden has been incredibly healing because I don’t have any shame any more.
‘OCD doesn’t really have a cure. Some people end up free of symptoms, but for most of us, it’s part of our wiring. My mind will always throw this stuff up, but the right therapy teaches you how to manage it more effectively.
‘Mine is a controversial story to tell, but it is also true. I felt I had been to hell and back and I wasn’t going to sugarcoat it any more — and, by being honest, I hoped it might help other people. I still get intrusive thoughts but I may get just a handful a day.
‘And they are not all sexual. Now they centre on other things, like the structural integrity of buildings or worries about my body.’
These days, Rose is recovered enough to be able to watch Pure with a detachment she once never thought was possible, in the company of parents, family and friends.
Her parents, she says, are very proud of her, though understandably upset that she suffered in silence for so long.
‘My parents have always tried their best for me. They would have gone to the ends of the Earth for me. They knew I was anxious and had intrusive thoughts, but not the content.
‘Marnie is based on me, so it was very intimate and quite difficult for them to watch. But they were so over-the-moon and delighted for me that my story was reaching a wider audience.’
Even the scene where Marnie is driven mad by intrusive thoughts of maternal incest? ‘My family knew that scene hadn’t come from my book, so that wasn’t part of my particular story,’ Rose says. ‘But, yes, it was still shocking.’
Rose car twright is the author of Pure (Unbound, £8.99), now a six-part drama on Channel 4 (wednesdays, 10pm).