OCD Inside Out: The Forging of Disorder

Abstract

People living with obsessive thoughts and engaging in compulsive behaviors (characteristics that henceforth I will call OCD) are well and often painfully acquainted with a wail that Jeff Bell eloquently describes in his memoir Rewind, Replay, Repeat. He writes:

There’s a sound BART trains make as they wend their way through the myriad curved tunnels that comprise the Bay Area Rapid Transit grid. It’s a shrill, high-pitched screech … I know this ugly wail. It’s the same one that bellows in silence from some tortured place deep inside of me. (127–128)

To Bell, the sound of OCD is shrill. It is acute and piercing. As we read his passage, we can hear the train squeal, metal on metal, until we want to cover our ears. What is worse, the sound can become eerily familiar. To me, another suggestive sensorial experience to convey the anxiety of OCD is visual, and it can be evoked by the famous painting The Scream, by Edvard Munch, with its agony-filled subject and its swirls of red and orange. This image tends to materialize spontaneously when I conjure up representations of the challenges of OCD, although there is no evidence that the artist himself used that as inspiration. For the accompanying written script, I would choose a stanza by Hughes Mearns that so perfectly embodies the duality of that which does not exist but still haunts us — the one that speaks of a man who, despite not being there, we want to wish away.¹