OCD and Me. Adrian McCarthy
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу OCD and Me - Adrian McCarthy страница 2
Название: OCD and Me
Автор: Adrian McCarthy
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Контркультура
isbn: 9781974994359
isbn:
We were among a very small number of people that Jacob had allowed through the gate to his apartment, an invitation he seemed to be beginning to regret. When opening doors for us, he reached for the least-touched corner, farthest from the actual doorknob. Maintaining an affable smile, he was clearly on edge. “Well, I’m going to have to clean stuff anyway. That is, we’ve already failed.” Resignation gave way to impatience. “If you touch anything in here, I will probably get a little bit angry.”
We made it through the doors to the lobby of his apartment building before he abandoned the plan. “Sorry . . . I’m sorry, I can’t, I can’t take you up the stairs. I am angsty right now.”
Jacob explained further. “I won’t touch this or this now. I won’t touch this, and I won’t touch that,” he said, pointing to the railings and stairs outside the doors, while gingerly stepping around our recent footprints. “You guys are OCD dirty. Later, if I’m leaving my apartment, it could be six months down the line, and I accidentally touch the place where I know you’ve touched, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, sh*t, I accidentally touched that thing.’ It will make me feel dirty and ruin the rest of my day.”
Mella
Mella Travers, Jacob’s mother, called her son “very, very lonely.” She told us she has never been in his apartment. When we told her our production crew had not been allowed in, she was not surprised. “No, no one gets in. Can’t.”
Like her son, Mella has OCD, though less severe than Jacob. “Mine is here,” she said, gesturing at about shoulder height, “and his is here,” she said, reaching far above her head. “His is more heightened than mine. He’s got this extra bit that affects my relationship with him. Not in the way that we communicate, but in the sense that I can’t touch him.”
Mella said she was motivated to talk to our film crew about OCD “because there are a lot of misconceptions about it, and there’s a lot of people that are hurting, that have OCD.”
Mella had an interesting way of describing the OCD experience. She directed me to write down the words ‘I wish.’ I wrote the words down on a piece of scrap paper. She continued, “Now write the name of somebody you care for very much,” which I then did. “Now just stop for a second—,” she said. When I stopped writing, she continued “would die in a severe accident today.” My pencil did not move.
“You want me to write this down?” I asked, incredulous.
“Did you write it?” she asked.
“No, I’m not going to write that.”
Mella explained that for many people with OCD, this is a type of “magical thinking” that they deal with. “OCD people think that just because they have a thought, it’s going to happen. That’s what OCD is,” she said.
What is OCD?
We put the following question to counseling psychologist and OCD therapist Leslie Shoemaker: “When somebody asks, what is OCD, what do you say?”
“It’s complex,” she said. “But I’ll stick to a really simple, broad definition. OCD stands for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. We define ‘obsessions’ as intrusive thoughts, so it could be a thought like, ‘if I don’t wash my hands, something bad is going to happen.’ It could be an intrusive image, where you see something terrible happening to somebody you care about. The compulsion bit is the action that people take to make the thought go away.”
“Hand washing, for example. Checking light switches, stoves, locks. And then there are inward types, where it could be praying, it could be counting, it could even just be thinking the same thought over and over and over again. Or even questioning the thought over and over again, looking for an answer you’re never going to arrive at.”
While emphasizing that everyone can have “weird and wonky thoughts,” the average person doesn’t think about them to extremes. “We don’t put much interpretation on them,” she said. “We don’t think about them too much. But for the person with OCD, these thoughts are a fact, and they’re a scary fact. I remember hearing once about a woman who was afraid that she brought down a whole planeload of people.”
Varieties of OCD
Jacob explained it this way. “You have, say, a tree, and the trunk is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Then each branch is a different form, i.e. contamination, invasive thoughts, counting, religious, things like that. Then on that branch, there’s another twenty branches, and each one of them is a different aspect of that form of OCD.”
Dr. Michael McDonough, consulting psychiatrist at St. Patrick’s Mental Health Services in Dublin, Ireland, explained how OCD works in the brain. “There’s a part of the frontal lobe of the brain, where a lot of the thinking and planning goes on. A circuit that connects that part of the frontal lobe with the feeling and emotional centers and also the centers that relate to deciding to move or act seem to be very active in OCD sufferers,” he said.
Psychologist Leslie Shoemaker adds “It’s an overinflated danger signal, where a person with OCD is always looking for danger and how to prevent that danger. And so, a lot of time gets consumed and sucked into being safe, and keeping others safe.”
“Yeah, you don’t turn it off,” Jacob said. “It’s constant, it’s tiresome. I pay such attention that you wouldn’t understand. If you lived in my world, you would notice so many more things. It’s so uncomfortable.”
“In a split second, I analyze so many different things. I don’t feel capable of having human interaction with another person on a daily basis, because of OCD, in terms of them being ‘OCD dirty,’ and I don’t want them to touch me. Always paying attention to whether or not someone is walking behind you faster than you are, so they’re probably going to pass you, in which case you’re going to have to step to the left in case they bump against you.”
“At crosswalks and stoplights, I won’t press the button. I’ll never press that button. The closest I’ve gotten is using my foot to do it, but that’s kind of mean, because other people have to press it and I feel bad about doing that. A few years ago, I used to use plastic gloves, about 200 every couple of days, because that's how I interacted with the world. If I needed to pick something up, I’d use plastic gloves. I would use two layers of plastic gloves and when it got real bad, I’d use three layers. And it’s only now that I don’t do that.”
Eileen
In a group meeting in Sligo, a community of about 20,000 in northwestern Ireland, we met several people who talked frankly about the challenges they face. This is one of Ireland’s few self-help anxiety support groups outside the capital of Dublin. Everybody in the group has his or her own unique form of OCD. One of them is Eileen Morrison.
“I СКАЧАТЬ