Unwinding the fears that drive OCD sufferers
A schoolgirl who eats an entire wall of her house. A man who thinks he’s a rat. And the author of this compelling new book who spent every waking hour believing he had AIDS. All plagued by the curse of...
Can one be just a little bit OCD? Many of those who have been diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder argue that there is no sliding scale: it’s all or nothing at all.
For them, it is only the extreme cases that merit the diagnosis. They point to lives consumed by irrational fears: the Ethiopian schoolgirl who eats an entire wall of her house – more than half a ton of bricks by the age of 17; the Dutchman who survives a heart attack only to find himself unable to stop whistling for eight hours a day; the man so terrified that he is turning into a rat that he can’t stop checking to see whether he is growing a tail.
But what of those of us who are occasionally pricked by irrational fears, and find strange ways to ward them off? Like a lot of people – four out of 10, they reckon – when I am somewhere high and unprotected, I feel a terrible urge to throw myself off. So I retreat as far as possible from the edge, and often clutch on to something, for additional protection. Sometimes I can even feel my heart begin to pound by looking at a photograph of someone hanging from a skyscraper, or tightrope-walking.
It’s reassuring to know that much more illustrious people have been beset by more consuming fears. Winston Churchill, for instance, was so alarmed by the urge to jump in front of trains that he would always try to stand with a pillar between himself and the platform. He also avoided travelling by ship, lest he be seized by the urge to jump in. ‘I’ve no desire to quit this world,’ he once told his doctor, ‘but thoughts, desperate thoughts, come into my head.’
Both George Washington and Chopin suffered from taphephobia, or the fear of being buried alive. Alfred Nobel, creator of the Nobel Prize, suffered so badly from it that he left a will in which he stated that ‘following my death my veins shall be opened, and when this has been done and competent doctors have confirmed clear signs of death, my remains shall be cremated’.
Hans Christian Andersen also suffered from it, and left a note by his bed that said: ‘I ONLY APPEAR TO BE DEAD.’ He was uncommonly troubled by several fairly common fears, rising a number of times a night in order to check he had locked the doors and extinguished the candles. Perhaps his most obsessive fear was of being burned alive. For this reason, he took a long rope with him wherever he went, so that he would always be able to escape from an upstairs window.
Which of these men could lay claimto full-blown OCD? In this fascinating book, David Adam suggests that Hans Christian Andersen might just about pass muster, but, in general, there is a clear line between those whose fears are occa- sional and those whose fears are constant. ‘People who say they are a little bit OCD have no real idea what it’s like to have a full-blown mental disorder. But they do know how hard or annoying or timeconsuming or unusual their little bit is. Now imagine you can never turn it off.’
Adam himself has OCD. There were early signs of it in his childhood. Aged five or six, he would tap out the numbers from one to 10 whenever he heard someone saying them out loud. Aged 13, he would hum The Dambusters theme tune to himself, but only in maths lessons. On a caravan holiday, he couldn’t stop checking that the gas fire was switched off. Often when he sealed an envelope, he would be seized by the thought that he had put the wrong name on the card, and have to open it to check.
But these inconveniences pale to nothing beside the obsession that was to plague his adult years. As a student at Leeds University in the early Nineties, his thoughts suddenly became dominated by the possibility that he might have Aids. ‘As I tried to brush away the thought, the snowflake, it squirmed from my mental grasp and settled. Quickly it was joined by another, then another, then another. The blizzard that followed blew the snow into every corner of my mind, and laid down a blanket that muffled every surface.’
You may think that it was perfectly sensible to develop a fear of Aids in the early Nineties, but this went way beyond the bound of reason. Adamwould phone the national Aids helpline for reassurance dozens of times a day, adopting funny accents so they wouldn’t guess it was him again. Sex didn’t come into it: Adam saw Aids everywhere, even worrying that he might catch it fromscraping his knee in the same place on a football pitch where someone with Aids might have scraped their knee earlier.
He thought about it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Years later, he spent his whole wedding day
At one time or another, most people will have thought, ‘What If I were to jump in front of that bus?’ or ‘What if I were to run someone over?’
worrying that a scientist with a sore on his lip he had met the week before had mixed up his drink and given him a glass infected with Aids.
The Man Who Couldn’t Stop interweaves the story of Adam’s own obsessive compulsive disorder with more general thoughts on the illness, its extraordinary range of manifestations, possible explanations, attempted cures, and so forth. Adam is a science journalist, and writes with masterful simplicity and bounce, bringing welcome clarity to even such an opaque subject as the peculiarities of the human brain.
The book will offer comfort and practical help to those suffering from OCD, as well as helping the rest of us understand it much better. At one time or another, most people will have thought ‘What if I were to jump in front of that bus?’ or ‘What if I were to run someone over?’ But what if these random thoughts never left us? ‘When we cannot make our strange thoughts go away they can lead to misery and mental illness,’ writes Adam.
Some of the true stories of OCD are peculiarly awful. The esteemed mathematician Kurt Gödel fell victim to an obsession that he would be poisoned, so he made his wife taste everything first. When she fell ill, and was unable to perform this duty, he chose to starve himself to death rather than risk eating contaminated food.
Compulsive hoarding is one of many branches of OCD. One of the most extreme cases involved two brothers in New York City who, in 1947, were found dead in their home amid 140 tons of rubbish, including prams, old food, a car chassis, 14 pianos, old Christmas trees and pots of their own excrement.
When a policeman broke in to investigate, he had to crawl for two hours through the clutter until he found the corpse of one of the brothers. The corpse of the other brother was discovered a full two weeks later, even though he was only a few feet away.
Adam describes many – perhaps rather too many – university medical experi- ments on people and animals (twins, fish, snakes) with results that, on closer examination, are never quite as convincing as they first appear. Is there perhaps a particular form of OCD that forces its victims to conduct dafter and dafter experiments on rhesus monkeys? Certainly, if I were a native of Papua New Guinea I would, by now, be sick to death of all those men in white coats with clipboards endlessly queuing outside my front door.
David Adam’s Aids obsession has not been cured, but he has managed to control it through a combination of pills and cognitive therapy.
When he first developed OCD in 1991, doctors told him the most likely cure was to place a rubber band round his wrist and twang it whenever he felt an unwanted thought coming on. Since then, understanding of OCD has come a long way. Doctors are more adept at dealing with it, and consequently sufferers are happier to come forward. The best way to kill the vampire, says Adam, is to let in the light.