Category: Blog

Me and my OCD

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I’m sitting in a Chester café with the actor Ian Puleston-Davies, better known as Owen in Coronation Street.

We’re supposed to be chatting over coffee and bacon sandwiches but Ian can’t settle – his Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is playing up.

“I’m sitting here obsessing about whether my ear is clean, about the stains on the table and how close the guy behind me is sitting,” he explains, trying hard to conceal his agitation.

“It took me ages to just sit down at the table as I was afraid it would break my coccyx on the chair.”

Ian is a patron of OCD-UK, the national charity campaigning for support and treatment for sufferers, which marks OCD Awareness Week from today [October 13], an initiative designed to change inaccurate perceptions about OCD.

“Sometimes,” adds Ian, “it’s exhausting just getting through the day.”

According to figures from OCD-UK, there are some 750,000 people in the UK living with OCD, an anxiety-related condition characterised by frequent uncomfortable and obsessional thoughts.

Around 50 per cent of cases fall into the severe category. It can strike from young children to adults, regardless of gender or cultural background.

“OCD is the poor cousin of mental health in that people tend to joke about it and trivialise the suffering of those living with it.”

Ashley Fulwood, Chief Executive of OCD-UK, adds: “But it is a serious illness and it can lead to tragic consequences.”

Ian suffered his first experience of anxiety-indicted OCD behaviour aged just seven years old. He was on the football pitch at his primary school in North Wales when his classmates started to tease him for fiddling with flies while passing the ball.

After that, he was always the last one to be picked for the team.

“I still remember being in my bedroom and consumed with the anxieties I subsequently nicknamed my habits,” he says.

“I felt like an alien. The only clue to what was happening came from reading the problem page in my mother’s copy of Woman’s Own about housewives obsessively washing their hands.”

Ian wasn’t diagnosed with OCD until the age of 35 by a Harley Street therapist and suffered in silence for the intervening years.

“I was crippled by over-sensitivity to everything: contamination, fear of harm to myself, or others,” says Ian. “I was even terrified that if I got up too quickly in the morning, then I’d break my back.”

At his lowest point, he simply couldn’t get out of bed, an image he later created for the opening scene of the ITV drama, Dirty Filthy Love (2004), a story about a man struggling to understand his OCD, co-written by Ian and staring the Welsh actor Michael Sheen.

For Ian, OCD Awareness Week is about encouraging sufferers to reach out for support and treatment.

Men suffering from mental illness are, he sighs, generally less inclined to share the problem with their partners or mates.

“I’m angry at myself for being weak. I’m a husband and a father, the paternal protector, but at times I’m shrivelled in the corner stressing about a stain on the wall.”

“Sometimes I feel OCD has completely emasculated me,” he says.

But a range of treatments are now available – from local community support groups to Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT), as well as the use of (SSRI) medication, an anti-depressant to control serotonin levels and reduce anxiety.

“Sufferers should seek help early as the longer you leave it, the worse it gets,” explains Professor Paul Salkovskis, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Bath.

“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with OCD sufferers’ brains and the research shows a good proportion of sufferers will not just improve, but may eradicate the condition, with suitable treatment.”

“Like learning a new language,” he adds, “you can actually retrain the brain.”

Back in the café, Ian he has finished his coffee but his sandwich remains half untouched. “We live in anxious times and the anxiety within us as a society is growing,” says Ian. “I’m really concerned about how our children are increasingly susceptible to OCD.”

“But, ultimately, I have to beat OCD and find some peace,” he adds. “After all, I can’t to go to my grave with wet wipes.”

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That’s OCD

This story was first published for Telegraph Men under the headline, Sometimes I feel OCD has completely emasculated me.

 

My dad is fading away

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I took my father away on holiday recently.

I thought a week cruising Norwegian fjords would do us both good and help us reconnect the father-son bond often lost amid the frenetic routine of our spin-cycle lives.

But, over the week, I realised something to my alarm: I feel my dad is drifting away.

Christopher [pictured above] recently turned 75 and is going increasingly deaf. He is slowing down yet his physical health remains generally good. But, while was never a man of many words, he now seems increasingly withdrawn into himself, sometimes lost in a world of silence.

It’s a very different experience to my mother’s premature decline, taken from us by cancer aged just 67 after several years of debilitating illness.

The changes I’m now witnessing with my father are slower and more about his interaction with the outside world, rather than any physical ailment.

Is the deafness, or loneliness after losing my mother after some 40 years of marriage? He doesn’t seem unhappy or depressed. But, then again, he probably wouldn’t tell me if he was.

I wanted to understand – not just how to help him but also how to deal with the increasing sense of loneliness I feel.

I’ve already lost one parent and now the remaining one is physically present yet emotionally withdrawn.

There are now 11m people aged 65 or over in the UK according to recent figures from Age UK, the country’s largest charity dedicated to making the most of later life. That number is expected to pass 20m by 2030.

Some 36 per cent of all people aged over 65 currently live alone and 17 per cent report less than weekly contact with family, friends and neighbours.

“Subjective responses to our surveys suggest that feelings of loneliness, isolation and withdrawal are growing, especially amongst older men,” says Mervyn Kohler, External Affairs Advisor for Age UK.

“While women have a greater propensity to keep in touch with friends and neighbours, men coming off the back of 40 years of working life often find it harder to adapt to the pace.”

Age UK traces a linear connection between isolation and deteriorating mental health. The organisation campaigns to find more imaginative ways to spark the interests of older people – especially older men.

A recent success was the Men in Sheds scheme, a pilot project in three locations around the UK to bring older men together to share and learn new skills, such as woodworking. The project has now finished at a national level but some partners still run it at a local level.

“It’s a question of self value to your family and community. Without that sense of worth, it’s a very corrosive journey,” adds Mervyn.

“The way our population is ageing is a wake-up call to find new ways forward, engaging a generation no longer prepared to just put on its cardigan and slippers.”

Independent Age, the charity acting as a voice for older people with 1,500 volunteers across the UK and Ireland, produces a series of Wise Guides, offering practical advice for older people and their families. These are free to order or download from their website.

They also operate a freephone national helpline – 800 3196789 – and offer a befriending service by phone or to the home.

“How to help depends every much on the individual situation and what they want, especially after potentially major life events, such as bereavement or health problems,” says Rosie Collingbourne, Advice Manager at Independent Age.

Practical steps the charity offers include a benefits check, getting support from social services for care needs, equipment for around the home and access to day centres to meet other people.

In an age of families living further apart and people relying increasingly on digital communication, their volunteers talk to the person to assess their particular needs.

“We offer concerned family members the same kind of advice,” adds Rosie. “Often they want to take control but you can’t get a resolution for an older person. You have to work with them.”

My father is not completely withdrawn – far from it. He still does his own shopping, volunteers at a local National Trust property and regularly phones his sister in Australia. We live close by and he regularly spends time with his granddaughters.

But I’m worried. It was little things on our holiday that rang alarm bells for me – from deliberately leaving behind his hearing aid to a general reluctance to join in activities with other people on the ship.

The fjords were beautiful and the cruise relaxing but I also set sail for home resolved to act.

It’s time to seek help, not let him drift away.

* Do you have a similar experience of caring for ageing parents? Share your view and advice below. 

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* This story was first publish by Telegrpah Men under the headline What do you do when your father starts to fade away?

 

Far from the madding crowd

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I’m forever going absent to get present.

We all do it at this time of year, using a summer escape to find some space to think away from hum of our spin-cycle lives.

But the distraction of exotic surrounds, foreign aromas and new horizons are often just a distraction – not a solution.

As the philosopher Alain de Botton writes in The Art of Travel,

“… on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy, nor condemn us to misery.”

To make the absence truly count, we need to embrace the art of being alone more than the journey itself.

The shepherds Thomas Hardy describes in his breakthrough tome, Far From The Madding Crowd, understood how to be alone.

The story’s protagonist, Gabriel Oak, breathes it with every exhalation of summer breeze, tastes it with every morsel of his handkerchief-wrapped meal.

Isolated in a limitless landscape, only the elements and their flock to commune with, the self-imposed exile of the shepherd is a true act of conscious absence.

Hardy observed these shepherds seeking refuge from the heat of the day and the demons of the night in their little huts. During the 1870s, when they liberally speckled the landscape alongside scarecrows and horse carts, Hardy described these humble dwellings as like a “little Noah’s Ark.”

These days the likes of young Gabriel are increasingly rare but their sanctuaries are returning to the pastoral landscape of Britain.

A new wave of living sheds, hand crafted from local wood and engrained with centuries of nomadic tradition, are appearing on fields and dales as places of escape of writers, artists, thinkers and dreamers.

They are places to embrace being the anti-establishment joy of being present in your act of absence – blissfully lost in nature. Better still, there are no airport queues or surly security guards to be negotiated.

Many are just a short drive from our own backyard. Rhydd Farm, a five-acre smallholding on the verdant fringes of Penyfford, Flintshire, was just 20 minutes from my own.

The shepherd’s hut [pictured above], handcrafted from red cedar and with furnished with thoughtful touches, offered me more than a simple woodland-shrouded home from home. It was a place to think and write.

That night, after a couple of pints of summer ale at the local village pub, I bedded down on a soft mattress to a lullaby of owls. My hosts were just across the fields in the farmhouse but I was wholly alone with my thoughts.

But the true sense of absence came the next morning. Beating the dawn chorus of farm livestock and domestic pets, I stood in the fields at 6am, a mug of tea in my hand and a gentle dousing of morning dew on my walking boots, to take in the view across the fields to Moel Famau.

According to Thomas Gray’s poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, an inspiration for Hardy’s febrile passion for English rural life, I was at last:

“Far From the madding crowd’s ignoble strife … / Along the cool sequester’d vale of life.”

There would soon be bacon frying on the grill then daily grinds to return to but, in that moment of delicious calm, I knew the isolation of the shepherds and made peace with it.

My absence had, at last, delivered me to a place of pure presence.

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Father’s day: Are dads better at story time?

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* Photo: Rebecca Lupton (www.rebeccalupton.co.uk)

I can remember the words to this day.

Aged seven-years old, sat with my grandfather in his front room, he would sip his tea and recite the poems he learnt at school to me.

Rudyard Kipling’s If was Granddad Harry’s particular favourite:

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute, with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run …”

I may have preferred Tiswas to Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade at the time, but it clearly had an impact.

I was lucky. Harry had a love of words and shared his passion with me from an early age – a tradition I now try to maintain with my own two daughters, aged four and eight respectively.

The fourth annual Fathers’ Story Week, starting today and running until Father’s Day this weekend, highlights the importance of male role models in getting kids to read.

So are dads (or granddads) better at story time than mums?

Dr Emyr Williams, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Glyndwr University in North Wales, believes that fathers can have more impact on a child’s fledgling grasp of literacy.

In a preschool world dominated by female figures, dads are different – hence they exert more potential to influence social learning. He explains:

“One of the ways in which children learn and develop is through mimicking and copying their role models.”

The role of father figures is, he says, particularly important to encourage boys to read independently, a group that traditionally looses interest in reading faster than girls.

“Fathers, grandfathers and other male relatives have the opportunity to change the path of literacy for young boys by encouraging a deep appreciation of literature established within a well-developed internal working model of seeing their hero read,” adds Dr Williams.

The importance of reading to young children has been well documented in recent years. Less well established, however, is how crucial the role of dads can be.

Recently, on Telegraph Men, Harry de Quetteville described story time as, “a humdrum yet powerful moment of communion between father and child, a moment when a bond of learning and trust is built.”

Michael Rosen, the former Children’s Laureate and campaigner for children’s literacy, used a recent appearance at the Hay Festival to slam Government education policy for a fixation with the mechanics of reading, rather than fostering the enjoyment of reading for pleasure.

He said: “We constantly live with governments who concentrate on all these narrow aspects of reading, and not of interpretation and understanding.”

It’s a subject on which The Fatherhood Institute, a fatherhood think-tank focused on policy, research and practice, goes further.

“Evidence suggests that when dads do bedtime stories well, they can have more impact,” says Joint CEO Adrienne Burgess.

“Mums tend to stick to the script but dads talks round the story, respond to the child and ask more questions.”

“Mums could reflect and learn from that,” she adds.

Recent research compiled by the Fatherhood Institute highlights the importance of fathers to their children’s learning and development. It found, for example, that preschoolers whose dads read to them a lot behave and concentrate better at nursery, and do better in maths.

At age five, these children know and use more words, can pick out letters more accurately, and are better at problem solving. By age ten, their vocabulary is wider and their numeracy skills are better, too.

“Dads tend to have higher aspirations for their children. If they can harness that forward aspiration for reading, by demonstrating a passion for words, or being a more theatrical story teller, they set a very strong example,” says Burgess.

As a single dad, bedtime stories have always been a special bonding time for my children and myself.

At bedtime this week we’ll be turning pages as usual. We’ve polished off a couple of Roald Dahl books in the last month. Charlotte’s Web was a big hit. And, while The Secret Garden is slow going, an iPad poetry app featuring Kipling and Edward Lear is proving a grower.

I may not be necessarily better at story time, but I’d like to think I’m more passionate about it.

And that, Granddad Harry would be proud of that.

Do you agree with the ideas in this article? Post your views below.

* More from more from www.fathersstoryweek.org

* This story was first published at Telegraph Men under the headline, Are Fathers Better at Bedtime Stories than Mothers?