by Laurie Gough
Rob could relate to all this, and to Quinn’s anxiety, much more than I could, since Rob himself — the most laid-back, easy-going person I knew — had something called generalized anxiety disorder (meaning Quinn had inherited some pretty interesting genes, the sidewalk-crack-stepping kind of OCD from his mother, and hidden anxiety from his dad). Rob’s fear was being trapped in small spaces. (Interestingly, the most common phobias are of primal dangers, such as snakes, spiders, heights, and small closed spaces, rather than of more realistic modern ones, like car accidents.) Rob knew his fear wasn’t logical and that’s how he could relate to Quinn’s OCD. He learned that to overcome his fear, he should make himself sleep in a tent in our living room, or make himself sit in the back seat of a car — situations that even thinking about could sometimes cause near panic attacks — but he found if he exposed himself to these things, he could ride out the waves of anxiety. Exposure worked.
Quinn’s obsession was a bit trickier since it wasn’t concrete. Rob tried to get him to say aloud, “Grandpa isn’t coming back,” but even hearing Rob suggest this sent Quinn racing into his room to climb up on the dresser and touch the picture, to loudly declare the opposite, as if this were the Middle Ages and Rob had uttered some kind of blasphemy that needed rectifying.
This made me think about how far back magical thinking goes in human evolution, back to when our primitive minds were so fraught with fear that we engaged in spells, curses, witchcraft, and superstition to ward off evil or to make things happen or to try to control things we had no control over. And magical thinking isn’t a phenomenon confined exclusively to the remote past. Today’s religions are full of magical thinking and superstition. In fact, for some reason that still isn’t understood, religious rituals weirdly echo OCD rituals. I was reminded of this every time Quinn placed his hand on his heart, looked up at the sky, and started in on his chant. Where did he get this? Certainly not from his upbringing. It made me think of Catholics making the sign of the cross over their hearts and saying Hail Marys while counting rosary beads, all in the hopes of making something happen, or warding some evil away. Hyperreligiosity, or scrupulosity, is a major feature of OCD. Five centuries ago, Ignatius of Loyola described the condition of scrupulosity as being overly anxious and obsessed with doing religious rituals perfectly. Other religious rituals besides the Catholic ones that mysteriously mimic OCD rituals include numerology and counting, repetition of mantras, hours of body cleansing, and rules about how to enter and leave holy places. Orthodox Hindu Brahmins can spend six hours a day in body cleansing rituals. They also have rules dictating the repetition of magic numbers, which foot to put down first when getting out of bed, and how to enter and leave the temple. Orthodox Jews engage in highly complex ritualistic eating and cleansing rituals, have strict rules about entering and leaving holy places, and also recite special numbers. Muslims must enter and leave mosques and cleanse their bodies in very specific ways. The list of striking similarities between religious rituals and the rituals of OCD sufferers goes on. Not performing these rituals leaves both the religious participant and the OCD sufferer with a sense of dread. And if these religious rituals aren’t performed “correctly” the person makes himself do them all over again. Where do these religious rituals come from and why do people with OCD — even little kids who know nothing of religion — also perform them? Nobody seems to know.
I wondered if magical thinking was genetically encoded in the primitive part of our brain — patternicity at work — and whether people with OCD were accessing those primitive vestiges. Certainly, for some reason, those primitive vestiges were inexplicably emerging. Was some long-forgotten corner of the ancestral brain being provoked? I thought about how ubiquitous magical thinking is across cultures. I recalled how Fiji and Southeast Asia had been full of superstition. Even in Canada, kids come up with magical thinking all the time on their own. I remember when I was a child my friend told me that if you drove past a graveyard and didn’t lift your feet off the car floor you lost five percent of your sex appeal. I lifted my feet off the car floor for years after that. I didn’t want to take any chances.
After the exposure experiment with Quinn failed — when Rob tried to get him to say that Grandpa wasn’t coming back — Rob tried getting him simply to walk across the living room into the dining room and not backtrack. Quinn was still doing this backtracking every day, walking into a room and leaving the exact way he’d entered, as if there were invisible footsteps on the floor that he had to retrace. Quinn said that the anxiety level of not retracing his steps was only a three out of five. On the chart he and Rob had made, all the other behaviours were still rated as fives, which meant they were too anxiety-inducing to tackle yet.
“So how did he do?” I asked.
“He lasted forty-five seconds in the dining room. He was just standing there with his back to me and making weird noises, like it was painful. Then he backtracked into the living room again.” Even though Rob looked exhausted, his eyes were shining.
“But why do you look so happy?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound that great.”
“It’s a breakthrough. It’s the first behaviour we’ve found in all this time that he can actually work on. And he lasted a full forty-five seconds. I finally figured out that these are the behaviours we should work on first because he has a way out if he needs it. He knows he can always backtrack. He just needs to stay in the dining room as long as he can and then he can retrace his steps. I told him if he can stay in the dining room a full two minutes tomorrow we’ll play cars together. He liked that idea.”
“And the picture on his wall? Can you work on that? Or what about just taking it down and hiding it?” I knew my suggestion sounded crass and unhelpful. Taking down that picture might send him over the edge. I sighed. “Maybe not a good idea,” I added.
“And one day he’ll have to see that picture hanging there where it’s always been hanging and not feel he has to touch it and talk to your dad.” Rob’s expression forwarded itself to someplace far away. I knew what he was thinking, the same thing I was thinking: that day seemed a long way off.
CHAPTER 14
The next morning I was in the kitchen with Quinn as I doled him out various remedies that supposedly helped lower anxiety and increase the serotonin to his brain. (Experts believe that OCD is related to the brain’s natural flow of serotonin being blocked.) I was giving him inositol and something called 5-HTP, a naturally occurring amino acid to help boost serotonin levels, along with B vitamins and calcium and magnesium for the anxiety. A lot of the information I was getting from books and from a friend of mine who was a nurse urged us to put Quinn on antidepressants. Antidepressants are commonly prescribed to people with OCD, not to stop the compulsions but to get the anxiety level low enough for cognitive behaviour therapy to work. So far we’d been relying on the cognitive behaviour therapy alone. I’d read so many frightening stories on OCD forums about kids and antidepressants that I was vehemently hoping we wouldn’t have to drug him. Besides, I was terrified of antidepressants.
A few months before Rob and I were married, in the spring of 2001, one of my very best friends in the world, Joe Fisher, committed suicide by jumping off a cliff. I blame his death on antidepressants.
I’d first met Joe when he taught a creative non-fiction class and I was his student. In Joe Fisher’s presence people felt alive, as if for the hours you were with him, there was nowhere else in the world to be and nothing else to do but listen to Joe’s stories. He once told me that when he was twenty-five he had gone to a Caribbean island and met a fisherman who took him on a rickety boat. When a storm blew in, the boat capsized and the two men nearly drowned. Water began to fill Joe’s lungs and an eerie surrender crept over him. Just then a dark muscled arm reached into the water, gathered him up, and threw him into a boat. When the rescue crew dumped Joe and the fisherman on shore, Joe dropped to his knees, kissed the ground, and then ran down the beach as if in a dream. Every
thing had taken on an aching vibrancy. “I’m alive! I’m alive!” he had shouted. An island woman watched him with amusement. They met, fell into an ecstatic love, and spent a week of what he called “being alive” together.
Joe was a journalist, a poet, an extensive world traveller, and the best-selling author of eight books, including The Case for Reincarnation, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama. One of his special interests was metaphysics and reincarnation, and here lies the irony: He considered suicide an injunction against cosmic law because those who commit it return to face the same problems in their next life. A chapter in one of his books was titled “The Fallacy of Suicide.” Yet on a sunny afternoon in May, Joe jumped off a cliff into the Elora Gorge near Guelph. His death sent shock waves through our community of friends, slashing through the hearts of the many who loved him. Joe was always the life of the party, always so upbeat and fun, we all said. How could this be possible?
The contributing circumstances were that just as Joe had been recovering from a serious back operation following a year of pain, he was faced with a financial crisis concerning land he’d bought in his beloved Prince Edward County, Ontario. These events coincided with his coming off painkillers cold turkey, then, ten days before he died, going to a doctor who gave him a sample bottle of untested antidepressants. Joe never knew this — it wasn’t printed on the bottle — but one of the side effects of those antidepressants was “suicidal tendencies.”
Perhaps for people who actually have a chemical imbalance and suffer from real depression, antidepressants are a good idea. But to prescribe them to someone normally happy and only temporarily going through a tough time seemed appalling. I’ve been wary of antidepressants ever since.
As for Quinn, he did seem depressed as I watched him swallow those natural remedies. But I knew it was the OCD that was causing it. The real Quinn was a bright-eyed, naturally exuberant boy full of fun, and, like Joe, a sensitive soul. I was willing to do everything in my power to protect him and bring him back to himself, and to me, unless things got so bad that it was our only option, that wasn’t going to involve putting him on drugs.
CHAPTER 15
Email to Quinn’s Scout leader
Hi Susan,
I’m sorry but I don’t think Quinn can go camping with the Scouts this weekend after all. We’re dealing with something that has come out of left field. Quinn has developed OCD and is anxious about all kinds of things that were no big deal to him a few months ago. I know the old Quinn loved Cubs and was looking forward to Scouts. Considering that he was full of anxiety just from being at his aunt’s recently (who he normally loves visiting) we can’t risk his going camping. I’m so sorry this is all happening!
Yours truly,
Laurie
Sometime during Quinn’s first missed week of school, he stopped talking, at least in full sentences. He was sitting next to me on the couch one morning, lost in a trance, mumbling to himself. My iPad lay on the coffee table and I suddenly wondered why he didn’t play Minecraft on it any more. This was the only video game he played, or at least, used to play. I hadn’t seen him playing it in weeks. Normally I didn’t like him wasting so much time on the game and always encouraged him to read instead. However, he used to enjoy Minecraft so much that I thought playing it again now would restore some of his former joy, or at least bring him out of his zombie state. “Hey, Quinn, Earth to Quinn! Do you want to play Minecraft?” He was so far off in another galaxy I was practically shouting as I handed him the tablet. He didn’t even look at me when he answered.
“Can’t, can’t. Too hard now. Now hard, too.”
I blinked. “What?”
Staring out the window, he said, “Have to erase everything. Everything erase to have.”
“Are you talking backward?”
“I’m erasing. Erasing I’m.”
“Jesus Christ. Why are you doing that, Quinn?”
He kept staring out the window at a red squirrel running the length of our railing on the deck. “Have to. To have.”
“You’re erasing your words? And that’s why you don’t play Minecraft any more? You’d have to erase what you created?”
He nodded, then turned to look right at me in alarm, like he had no idea why any of this was happening to him, like he was lost in a deep, tangled forest and he wanted me to help him find his way out.
But how to find my way in?
“Oh, sweetie,” I said, “it’s going to be okay. You’re going to get better. This won’t last forever. I promise.”
He grabbed a cushion from beside him on the couch and hurled it across the living room. “I hate OCD!” he shouted.
“Me, too!” I threw a cushion across the room also. “I hate your OCD bully! He’s an asshole!”
“Yeah!” said Quinn, brightening.
I snatched the cushion behind me and tossed it at Quinn. “Let’s have a pillow fight!” He looked at me in surprise and I could see the tiniest of smiles curling the line of his mouth. “Go get more pillows from your room. We’ll collect all the pillows in the house!” Quinn stood up as if he were on the way to get the pillows. Then he sat down again.
“What? Aren’t you getting them? It’ll be fun! You and Halla always used to have pillow fights. And you and I did, too. Remember? We can pretend our orange chair is the OCD bully and beat it with pillows. We can even kick it. Punch it!”
He was back to staring out the window. “Can’t, can’t.”
The second can’t was almost whispered, to erase having said it the first time, I guessed. A great anger was swelling up in me. Who the hell did this OCD bully think he was, kidnapping my lovely little boy like this? Holding him hostage? Ruining his life?
“I so fucking can’t stand that OCD bully!” I heard myself say. “Why is he doing this to us?” At that moment I didn’t care that I was swearing in front of my child. Everything felt hopeless. “I feel like turning you upside-down by the ankles and shaking the OCD out of you. Can I?” I tickled him in the ribs. “Can I, sweetie?”
Quinn looked at me with a face that seemed to have resigned from duty. He was far away again, about to become as remote and unfathomable as interstellar space. “Wouldn’t work.” He turned his gaze back to outside. In a smaller voice, he said, “Work wouldn’t.”
That afternoon I took Quinn to what would be the first of two appointments with a hypnotherapist in the nearby Quebec town of Aylmer. When you have an unwell child you will try almost anything to get him better, even if it goes against your better judgment. Just the day before, Rob had blurted out, “Let’s just pack the camper van and head for the Southwest. We can stay in the desert at one of those National Forest campgrounds. We can go back to that extreme mountain bike place that Quinn loved. He’ll have no time for OCD if he’s riding his bike on a course like that every day.” I thought back to our camping trip from two years before and the bike ride we’d done, the exhilarating wind-roaring climbs up into the Colorado blue sky before the terrifying plummet back down over the red rock ground. Still, I knew it wouldn’t work. This was the kind of escapist thinking I’m usually prone to myself. I was surprised to hear it coming from rational Rob. I told him going there would just mean we’d have a child with OCD in the desert instead of here. He saw my point.
But now, here I was doing something perhaps equally desperate, calling a hypnotist. I’d first called this woman back in the summer, when Quinn was evening-off and I didn’t yet understand it was OCD. I’d thought perhaps hypnotism could stop the behaviour. We’d had a long conversation, and this woman had explained in a sweet voice that she believed in something called family constellations. She was convinced that when people are emotionally stuck, it’s the result of a trauma in the life of one of his or her ancestors. I found this fascinating but it didn’t jive with Quinn’s situation. His problem was clearly his own personal trauma of losing his grandpa; forget trauma in the lives of his ancestors. And any
way, doesn’t everyone on the planet have ancestors who experienced some kind of trauma and loss? A century ago people simply accepted that terrible things could happen to them at any time because they so often did. Nonetheless, when I’d explained about Quinn making everything even, she told me treating something like that would be easy for her, especially since he was a kid. I didn’t make an appointment with her back then because he had actually improved over the summer, and, besides, she sounded a little flaky and overconfident. But now, when the OCD was so much worse than in those early days of simply making things even, and since we were still on in those interminable waiting lists with the medical system, I’d called her again. When I explained the situation this time, she was surprisingly still full of confidence. She told me she’d gotten rid of children’s OCD many times. “I can probably do it in one session.”