Read The Man Who Couldn’t Stop for Free Online

clear: OCD is not simply an exaggerated form of everyday worries. And it is a mistake to think that the apparently trivial subjects of some intrusive and obsessive thoughts mean they cannot bring serious problems. Bira thought only of a mud wall, and the consequences came to dominate her life. Mike, Jack and Jennifer all sought help for their obsessive thoughts about their relationships and the negative impact these thoughts had on their life. Their thoughts caused them persistent distress for several hours each day. That’s the OCD.
    *   *   *
    There will be some people who, if they have read this far, will have turned each page of this book with a shake of their head. Ideas to hurt children? Urges to drive my car off the road? I don’t have thoughts like that .
    That’s certainly possible. Even the best conducted surveys that use trained and face-to-face interviewers come up against a stubborn 5 per cent or so of people who deny they have, or ever have had, unwanted intrusive thoughts. Some are probably lying, though psychologists won’t say so. There is a different explanation. If you are absolutely certain that you don’t have intrusive thoughts then don’t feel too smug just yet. Some people do have these thoughts, the urges to commit murder or to torture animals, but they simply do not recognize and report them as unwanted . To these people, such thoughts could feel as normal as to ponder what to buy a child for their birthday. There is a name for such individuals: psychopaths.
    In 2008, psychologists in Canada published the results of an experiment that aimed to test whether psychopaths would report fewer unwanted intrusive thoughts. Psychopaths are broadly defined as people who behave in a way that breaches social expectations and norms, but who feel no remorse or shame when they do so. They lie, cheat and steal and can inflict great cruelty with no care that others consider what they do is wrong.
    In search of psychopaths, the Canadian psychologists quizzed inmates of the Nanaimo Correctional Centre, a medium-security facility on the south shore of Brannen Lake in Vancouver Island, a local beauty spot and one popular with holidaymakers. One prisoner there told them he had thoughts about throwing a baby off a bridge, just to see the reaction of people, and another had an urge to perform his martial arts on someone for no reason. But almost three-quarters of the prisoners questioned said they did not have intrusive thoughts.
    Were these convicts who denied intrusive thoughts psychopaths? The scientists asked them to answer a set of 60 questions, designed to probe people for psychopathic traits. It’s a self-report version of the so-called psychopath test. Sure enough, those prisoners with the highest scores on this psychopath test were also those who were less likely to report intrusive thoughts. If they experienced the intrusions and the impulses at all, they seemed less troubled by them. They did not find them repugnant, perhaps because they did not find the contents disturbing.
    It’s possible that the prisoners were not psychopaths, just liars. Perhaps, even under the controlled conditions of an anonymous study, they were reluctant to admit their most bizarre and unwanted thoughts. Maybe they worried their darkest thoughts would be recorded and used against them. As we’ll see, they often are.

 
    THREE
    The mademoiselle and the Rat Man
    I do not fear HIV as it is now understood – a fragile and hard-to-catch virus that leads to an infection that is largely managed with drugs, at least by those who can get them. Obsession closed around my thoughts as they were in 1991 and keeps them in that state today. So the HIV I focus on is the disease of the late 1980s, a devastating and life-ending consequence of lack of control, of a moment’s thoughtlessness. A threat so severe that in 1986 it demanded the UK government beam into our houses shocking television