Tortured by your own thoughts

Every mental illness comes with its own baggage of public perception. For instance, depression has achieved a degree of social understanding and acceptance thanks to several celebrities — from Chimamanda Adichie to Deepika Padukone — ‘coming out’ about their battles with it. In The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD, and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought, journalist David Adam writes about his battle with OCD and his attempt to overcome the illness by understanding it, only to realise that “no pathology of thought can be solved with more thought”. From a girl who eats an entire wall of mud to Kurt Gödel, the brilliant mathematician who starved himself to death, to his own obsessive fear of contracting HIV, Adam details numerous cases where an ‘obsession’ first makes its appearance as a single, harmless thought, then gradually takes over the mind, which then tries to assert its control by unleashing a ‘compulsive’ behaviour that in many cases rapidly spins out of control, sometimes ending in suicide or self-harm. Narrated with humour and lucidity, the book is a fascinating exploration of “how the brain, our closest ally and biggest asset in millions of years of evolution, can turn against us.” It might be enlightening to follow it up with Johann Hari’s Lost Connections, which connects depression to cultural norms, and Sarah Wilson’s First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, a memoir about chronic anxiety.