OCD Resources

For anyone upset by Channel Four’s recent portrayal of OCD in the questionable series OCD Cleaners, this is a precious  opportunity to redress the balance and put your side of the story.

By contacting the production team (by phone or email if your prefer) you are in no way committing to take part in any future progamme. You can remain anonymous and will be dealt with sensitively.

Although I would think very carefully about using citalopram again, at the time of prescription, it played a crucial part in my recovery and I will always be grateful for that.

My life has been blighted by OCD and severe anxiety since childhood , culminating in untenable panic attacks, suicidal compulsions and a complete breakdown. At a point where I believed I would never again be able to participate in a normal life with my family, citalopram successfully controlled my OCD and gave me hope for the future.

Everyone has a choice whether to resort to medication or not and many are quite rightly cautious. However, from my own experience I would recommend anybody who finds themselves in desperate circumstances to at least consider medication as a short term addition to any longer term therapy. For me, the side-effects, though unpleasant and frightening, were a fair price to pay for my ultimate moves towards recovery and hopes for a healthy future.

I cannot speak for them but it does seem likely that an unwillingness or inability to confide, is a contributory factor in these situations. This was born out by my own son on being faced with the trauma of his own friend’s death. By his own admission it took a great force of will just to tell me about it because, in his own words, ‘I probably ought to tell someone’ but he baulked at the idea of discussing his loss with his closest friends, even though they had also suffered the loss of this young man.

I have heard it said that isolation is often at the root of suicide. Isolation takes many forms and young men who cannot shared their feelings are immediately removing themselves from the understanding and support of others.

It is heartbreaking to think of anyone being so lonely and defeated but it seems particularly poignant in the case of these young people at the peak of their potential and barely starting out on the road of life.

C.A.L.M, a charity set up in the UK to support young men at risk from suicide, has recently opened a confidentially helpline.

Read an interview with Jane Powell, the Director of C.A.L.M

An Illustrated Talk With Maurice Sendak

Photographer Jon Crispin has embarked on a journey to photograph the contents of some of these suitcases. He talks about his aspirations for the project here.

Far from being an insensitive intrusion into the private affairs of those no longer here to defend themselves, Crispin is only too aware of the stories behind the objects. He explains,

‘I never got over the idea that there were people here without their consent, largely because they were having problems that today we would be able to treat – grief , obsessiveness, Asperger’s – I’m not a ghost hunter, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of people in that space. Each case was a life lived.’

Read Crispin’s blog about his Willard Suitcases photographs and other projects

Visit an Online Exhibition of the Willard Suitcases

In a recent essay, well known neurologist and writer, Oliver Sacks explains how unreliable these recollections can be. He proposes that our memories are actually constantly redefined over time by human interaction and the influence of the wider world around us.

Rather than seeing this as a negative idea he makes a strong case for this collaboration as essential for the particular creativity and flexibility of the human mind. He argues that it is only by relinquishing the true source of our memories we are free “to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge.”

Speak, Memory – An essay by Oliver Sacks

A recent example of this is the power of poetry, particularly when learned by heart and recited aloud. From childhood I’ve been  a passionate reader and writer but for years was very much in the prose camp. With a scientific bent and rather linear thought processes, I never really ‘got’ poetry. This indifference was honed to fear by an education in English Literature involving the compulsory dissection  and analysis of  bland, two-dimensional verse.

Over the last couple of years I have found myself drawn to the poetry books that have waited patiently on my bookshelves for twenty five years (I married a poetry lover) and am similarly drawn to the poetry section in the library. Feeling my way through various poets and styles, I have discovered poems that at last seemed to talk to some part of me. I have also feel compelled to copy out my favorites into note books, preserving them for the future, scared I might somehow lose them if I don’t commit them to paper.

I put this new awakening down to my age – an open-mindedness that perhaps comes with maturity. I then began to notice several pieces in the media about how reading poetry activates  more parts of the brain than other written forms and how it might have therapeutic benefits. The reciting of poetry from memory is thought to be particularly beneficial. As Brad Leithauser puts it so eloquently in his New Yorker  article:

“The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen.”

If you present at your GP with a broken leg, the fracture would not be somehow ‘less real’ because it was caused by someone pushing you down the stairs. It would still be a broken bone. My nervous breakdown may have be facilitated by a cumulative bombardment by personal traumas but I was most definitely ILL and required the appropriate medical treatment.

BBC News – ‘Grief and anxiety are not mental illnesses’.