The Man Who Couldn’t Stop
David Adam
There’s no such thing as ‘a little bit OCD’. People with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder can’t stop their thoughts. They might obsess about germs, AIDs or burning the house down. Or they might fear they will steal money or stab their own baby. They perform compulsive rituals in order to prevent their thoughts from coming true, but it never goes away. Nor do the thoughts usually come true. It’s just a bit of brain biology / mind psychology gone wrong.
This novel is a bit of a mix between memoir, textbook and examples. It doesn’t profess to provide any concrete answers. Instead it explores the history of OCD, different interesting cases of OCD and indeed the almighty DSM-5 that is used for categorizing mental illness everywhere.
I learnt about the difference between OCD and OCPD. So many people who say they are ‘a little OCD’ might have OCPD (obsessive compulsive personality disorder), but in fact they have nothing like OCD. For an OCD sufferer, their life is hell. I’ll keep that in mind, and next time someone gives me that line, maybe instead we can have an honest conversation about mental illness and how things are. It is one thing to accept mental illness, and another to trivialise it.
You don’t have OCD? You don’t know anyone with OCD? You’ve somehow never heard about it? Seriously. Get on and read this novel. You won’t be disappointed.
Wow. This novel. Non-fiction is winning at the moment. This was fantastic and well-written. I felt myself at Tara’s side, and I absolutely empathised with every situation she found herself in, likely or not. We are walked through her childhood and highschool years, and then her ‘career’ after that. There are so many situations that Tara found herself in, and it feels like she has done justice to describing them in this novel.
Honestly, this novel wasn’t quite right for me. It’s history, written in a sort of fictional, accessible format. Unfortunately I’m not interested in history at the best of times. I was hoping that this novel would pull me in a bit, but it wasn’t quite powerful enough to overtake me. I read selections of this, and enjoyed those. I made sure to just pick those ones though, English history bores me silly (but I can totally go for the Berlin Wall).
For me, this had a lot of backstory of each of the midwives so that you got a good feeling for who they were as people, as well as within their jobs. I would have loved to have more about the actual mothers and children. Every birth story is different, and I have a strange fascination with reading about them.
Some lines were truly funny, and required sharing with my partner, my workmates, the wider world! But others were thought-provoking and hard to take in. It reminded me in some way of 
I could hardly put this novel down, which was surprising because its basically a memoir. I’ve never heard of her though, so it was all new to me. I did enjoy the ‘journey’ right from the beginning of her life.
Most of us want to hope that we won’t fall for a Con. Who would get into a pyramid scheme? Hell, I was almost pulled into one as a kid, but it didn’t work in Australia because we don’t have $1 notes to post. The deal was that you post $1 to each person on the list, then you add your name to the bottom of the list. Then the more people you send it to, the more you make back. Now it costs a $1 to send the damn letter, so you wouldn’t even break even!
This was impressive because Petraitis had obviously done her work well (as she has in her other books, which I now want to get my hands on), and she places the emphasis on the human touch. Humans are fallible, and criminal ones even more so. The book also highlighted the impact on police officers’ family lives in the days after a crime.
It could be quite a heavy book but Lal makes an effort to keep the action moving and to always have a bit of humour. If not, there was a profound insight being shared, or expanded upon. I particularly enjoyed the notes from her brother’s journal.
