Confronting and understanding the disorder has been a lifelong journey for me. My memoir, Pure, is just the latest stepDefining obsessive-compulsive disorder is tricky. Redefining it against the grain of near-universal misunderstanding is trickier. For decades, OCD has been conflated with perfectionism, rigidity, neatness, cleanliness. I hope that Pure – the Channel 4 TV drama series based on my book of the same name about living with intrusive sexual thoughts – has gone some way towards addressing these misconceptions.What I didn’t want to do with Pure was replace one reductive definition with another. OCD is no more about sex than it is about tidiness. The object of the obsessions is actually irrelevant when defining the mechanics of the condition and how it affects your brain. Someone with OCD experiences repetitive unwanted thoughts, fears, doubts or images. Everyone is familiar with such intrusions. But not everyone is rendered intensely anxious by them, or feels compelled to spend hours every day trying to resolve, escape or explain them. It’s this compulsive reactivity that marks out OCD. The compulsions make the obsessions worse and sufferers get stuck in a debilitating loop: a vicious cycle.Aged five, I’d climb the walls, terrified the Bosnian conflict would come for my family Related: Pure review – a masterly comedy about sex and mental health Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2019-02-21 00:00:00 UTC ]