Robert Goldberg wants to measure Boston’s stress. Then, he wants to relieve it.

His tool? A monitor strapped to the wrist that measures the steam-between-the-ears stress of rush-hour traffic or the soothing effects of an afternoon nap.

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The neuroscientist wants to attach stress-readers to thousands of Bostonians, hoping the data will help identify which college triggers the most anxiety, which highway induces the most stress, and which companies have the mellowest workforce.

Then, he wants to take the same measurements of other cities to compare Boston’s stress index against the world’s. To measure this stress, Goldberg helped found and now runs Neumitra, a 6-year-old startup that has so far spent more than $1 million to develop a stress-tracker
.

Ultimately, he hopes that awareness will help people reduce their stress levels.

“I founded Neumitra to see a world where mental health is quantified” like physical health, he said. The lack of hard data contributes to the stigma around mental health, said Goldberg, who has a family history of brain health concerns.

About a dozen public and private partners have agreed to work with Neumitra to distribute the technology to their employees, patients, or students, said Goldberg, whose company is underwritten by grants and private investors, and will eventually be funded by selling the tracker to companies looking to reduce worker stress. Privacy is protected, he promises, with partners getting only group-level data, not personal information. Participants will be able to turn off data sharing at any time. But managers who are pushing their staff over the edge might be outed.

‘I founded Neumitra to see a world where mental health is quantified.’

Robert Goldberg, neuroscientist 

Other local entrepreneurs are developing stress-busting technologies, too, said Ben Rubin, cofounder and chief executive of Change Collective, a website that offers self-help courses to promote healthy change. For instance, Boston-based Thync offers a wearable $300 device that delivers low-level electrical pulses intended to calm or energize users.

The scientific understanding of stress has deepened over the last few decades, Rubin said, but most of that information has remained “locked up in the academic research or meditation/spiritual communities.” Now, technology is beginning to provide data on personal stress and emotional status, and new treatment approaches. “We’re where the fitness and exercise measurement and improvement market was five or 10 years ago,” he said.

Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

An example of differences in appearance, perhaps due to stress, in President Obama during his first and second terms.

At Neumitra, Goldberg and his cofounders, algorithms engineer Safiyy Momen and biotechnologist Anand Yadav, say they’ve learned a lot about themselves from wearing wrist monitors that track their skin’s electrodermal response, a measure of stress commonly used in lie detector tests.

Several unmarried Neumitra staffers have found that dating is one of life’s most stressful events. Gurteg Singh, a research scientist with the company, also recorded a major stress hit when he jumped off a T platform to rescue someone who had fallen to the rails.

Goldberg’s most stressful moment, his tracking shows, was in 2011, when he went to the Pentagon to pitch his monitor to the military’s top brass.

“This is me [essentially] having a panic attack as I was getting ready to present to the office of the secretary of defense,” Goldberg said recently, pointing to a fever chart showing a gigantic spike about 3:30 p.m. on March 2. It was 10 times bigger than the bump he got boarding the T to Logan Airport that morning.

The monitoring idea started in an entrepreneurship class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009, when Momen, Yadav, and Goldberg, then classmates, decided they wanted to do something on a grand scale to promote mental health.

Darin Dougherty, who taught the Neurotechnology Ventures class, said he was impressed by their dedication to creating a company out of their vision. “We encouraged all the people to start companies,” Dougherty said. “Not all tried. Not many were successful.”

Dougherty said Neumitra measures the same things he tracks in his lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he is director of the division of neurotherapeutics. But instead of hooking people up to a rack of devices in the hospital, Neumitra’s technology fits easily on a wrist — and is no less accurate, Dougherty said.

This miniaturization will allow researchers to track healthy people as well as those diagnosed with conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, offering the kind of large-scale baseline data never before available, he said.

“Getting data in 1,000 people is a big thing,” said Dougherty, adding that most of his studies include no more than 25.

The Neumitra device includes a thermometer, an accelerometer to track motion, and a heart rate monitor to distinguish between physical activity and psychological stress.

Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

A diagram showing stress data.

Neumitra had made a watch to carry its tracking system, but now plans to provide it on an existing device, such as an Apple Watch.

When finalized this fall, users will be able to input their activities across a day, to see which causes the most stress and what they find most relaxing. The program will then color-code the different categories of activities: deeper shades of red for more anxious ones, deeper blue for calmer.

GPS tracking, when turned on, will allow users to map where they are most high-strung. Goldberg said that by seeing where their tension starts to rise, users may be able to derive a measure of control.

The device vibrates to indicate rising stress, such as when rushing to a meeting, getting annoyed at a coworker, or blushing at a mistake. The vibration is enough to catch the wearer’s attention, but subtle enough that others won’t notice.

Goldberg’s own stress still spikes on the T and when he’s at medical appointments; it’s lower when he’s napping than when he turns in for the night. He has noticed that when he has a short or bad night of sleep, his stress levels are measurably higher the next day.

The monitoring has also made him more sensitive to others, Goldberg said. Looking at the fever chart of someone with an anxiety disorder or anyone with a stressful profession or life “really starts to open your eyes to being empathic about what people are experiencing.”

Karen Weintraub can be reached at karen.weintraub
@globe.com.

OCONOMOWOC, Wis. – A new home off Highway 67 for specialized outpatient services will provide dedicated space and convenient access for patients as programs move from the main campus at Rogers Memorial Hospital—Oconomowoc, part of Rogers Behavioral Health.
Workers are currently putting the finishing touches on the renovation of a 21,000-square-foot facility at 1205 Corporate Center Drive. Rogers’ Silver Lake Outpatient Center is expected to open on Sept. 28, 2015.

According to Suzanne D. Harrison, MPH, vice president of Rogers–Oconomowoc operations, “The Silver Lake Outpatient Center gives us the wonderful opportunity to consolidate our ambulatory programming in a single facility just two miles down the road from our main campus. We believe this dedicated treatment space should further enhance the quality care we provide as we endeavor to meet critical mental health care needs in our community.

“This is a win-win for our patients and visitors, as this also lessens congestion at our main campus, where we continue to provide inpatient and residential treatment,” she adds.

The Silver Lake Center, named for the lake in southeast Oconomowoc, will house all local intensive outpatient (IOP) and partial hospitalization (PHP) programs. The facility has 12 group therapy rooms, ten consult rooms, an art studio room, a dining area, a multi-purpose room and more treatment space for patients to work on recovery-oriented activities.
Harrison adds that while the location was a previous medical facility, renovations have created more open space to allow natural light to filter in. Similar to Rogers other locations, colors and materials have been chosen with an eye toward incorporating the healing powers of nature into the inside environment.

Existing IOPs and PHPs for general mental health and OCD and anxiety, along with a child and adolescent eating disorder service currently at Rogers’ West Allis location, will relocate to the new center. And, three new programs including an adult posttraumatic stress disorder PHP, an adult cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for anxiety and depression PHP, and an adult dual diagnosis PHP will be offered at this location starting this fall.

In similar moves in the last year, Rogers shifted its PHP and IOP programming at its two other hospital campuses in West Allis and Brown Deer to dedicated space in specialty outpatient centers near its hospitals.

“This is a very exciting time for Rogers,” says Harrison. “Through these changes we will be better able to guide our patients through their recovery process.”

Wisconsin-based Rogers Behavioral Health System is a private, not-for-profit system nationally recognized for its specialized psychiatry and addiction services. Anchored by Rogers Memorial Hospital, Rogers offers multiple levels of evidence-based treatment for adults, children and adolescents with depression and mood disorders, eating disorders, addiction, obsessive-compulsive and anxiety disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder in multiple locations. For more information, visit www.rogershospital.org.

CALGARY  – Between 10 and 20 per cent of Canadian children will experience a serious anxiety disorder before they reach adulthood and one per cent of kids will experience obsessive compulsive disorder before age 15.

“Some degree of anxiety is normal,” says Dr. Paul Arnold, Director of the Matheson Centre for Mental Health Research at the University of Calgary. “Where we start to get concerns is if their behaviors or emotional distress is persistent and starts to interfere with day to day life.”

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Symptoms of anxiety disorders can be terrifying for children but they can also be difficult to spot.  Calgary father and host of Hockey Night in Canada, Kelly Hrudey admits he missed the signs when his youngest daughter Kaitilin began struggling with mental illness nearly 10 years ago.

“It was really hard, we didn’t know what Kaitilin was going through,” the former NHL goaltender recalls.  “We saw every individual behavior but we didn’t put everything as though it was one package.”

Kaitilin, who is now a second year university student at the U of C, says she began experiencing symptoms the summer before junior high.

“I had a lot of scary thoughts in my head, mostly about diseases and dying. They just became obsessive and I couldn’t control them. It came to a place that I convinced myself that if I stayed with my Mom and Dad the thoughts in my head wouldn’t come true so I would go to school or dance class or anything.”

Kaitilin says it was a terrifying time but after years of therapy she began experiencing more good days than bad.  Now, she shares her story so that other families don’t feel so alone.

“I’ve been there and I know how scary it is but it does get better.  As long as you stay strong and you keep fighting.”

Symptoms of OCD include intrusive, persistent, distressing thoughts and repetitive behavior.  “The repetitive behavior is often what parents notice first,” says Arnold.  “An example would be handwashing, certainly if you start to see excessive repetitive behaviors that are taking up  a great deal of time, are distressing to the child or are  interfering with their day to day life we start to get concerned with OCD.”

The most common form of treatment for OCD is cognitive behavioral therapy in which children are taught coping strategies to deal with their anxiety. Medication may also be used.

Kaitilin and Kelly Hrudey will be sharing their family’s story this Friday at the Arden Theatre in St. Albert.  Tickets are still available online.

Gemma Myers can’t leave her Redcar home until it is absolutely spotless.

From plumping up the scatter cushions to wiping down every surface, the 24-year-old ensures her two-bedroom bungalow is up to her exacting standards.

Diagnosed with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) three years ago, Gemma’s “vicious circle” of obsessional thoughts and compulsion to carry out rituals which includes cleaning is something she has lived with for several years.

Now her story will be featured on Channel 4’s Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners tonight at 8pm.

It began when she was 18 and a new mum to Kaysha, now five.

“I had postnatal depression and although my daughter wanted for nothing, I just couldn’t sit and cuddle her or play with her on the floor,” said Gemma, a line manager for a care company.

“Every night after she’d gone to bed I’d lock myself in the bathroom and sob because I was so ashamed, I felt like such a failure, like such a bad mum for not loving my daughter properly.”

Gemma went to see her GP and was diagnosed with postnatal depression and stress anxiety disorder.

“I couldn’t control my feelings but I could control my environment and could control where things went,” she said.

Things became so bad that she reached a point where she didn’t leave the house and in 2012 she was diagnosed with OCD and bipolar disorder.

“I would go through periods where I was on top of the world and thought I was a great person and then I would come crashing down.“Some days I’d wake up and think I can’t face things, I don’t want to be here and other days I’d jump out of bed excited about what the day would bring.”

Now on medication and having received counselling and undergoing cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) Gemma is keen to spread the message that help is out there.

“I’m starting to get better,” she said. “The big message I want to put out there is if you’re feeling like I was don’t sit and think you’re a failure, you’re ill and you need help. There is light at the end of the tunnel.”

Gemma applied to go on the TV programme after sitting watching the show with her then boyfriend and friend.

“They’d said ‘that’s you’ and ‘you’d never be able to go in a house like that’ and it gave me that determination,” she said.

“Also it had got to the stage with Kaysha that she’d rather do the polishing with me than play Barbies and I thought ‘no this has to stop’.”

After a series of interviews and filming sessions Gemma – who admits even her two Chihuahuas Oscar and Winston get a quick anti-bacterial wipe swept across them – was picked to be on the show and was sent to Norwich to be teamed up with a mum who struggled with hoarding.

She said they bonded sharing their stories with each other and have kept in touch.

“I’m quite minimal and she hoarded everything,” she said.

“The hardest bit was seeing her eight-year-old daughter’s bedroom as there was only a tiny bit of carpet with nothing on it.”

Gemma says her OCD focuses predominantly on having the beds made and surfaces wiped down and she carries a bottle of hand sanitiser around with her.

“But because I keep on top of it I don’t have to spend hours cleaning,” added Gemma, who admits she’ll run a bathroom wipe around the sink after Kaysha has cleaned her teeth despite already doing it as part of her morning clean.

“I hate dust and the beds always have to be made.”

There are two kinds of people in the world: those whose email inboxes are infuriatingly empty and those whose inboxes are more packed than a New York City subway during rush hour.

The former never have any unread emails, while those in the latter group tend to have anxiety-inducing numbers in that red bubble on their mail apps.

We chatted with some media and marketing executives and asked them which end of the spectrum they were on:

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Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategist, Publicis Groupe
Despite a busy travel schedule, Tobaccowala ensures he stays on top of his emails — giving himself a 24-hour deadline to reply to each email.

“We are living in real-time world; fast responses matter,” he said. “It also enhances my productivity since I do not have to worry about ticking time bombs.”

Choire Sicha, co-founder, The Awl
Sicha has so many unread emails that his phone apparently can’t even display them.

“It’s like 240,000 something,” he said.

Jason Harris, president, Mekanism
Harris has self-diagnosed himself with EMOCD, “Electronic Mail Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,” and said that he checks his email obsessively.

“I need to read my email every night and be caught up before I roll into attacking the next day,” he said. “It keeps me calm.” He added that the screenshot above is misleading because he was traveling and not able to get it updated. “That’s what I will be doing later tonight,” he said.

Robert Scoble, Rackspace Hosting
Scoble is notorious for his carefully crafted automatic response, which is sent to anyone who emails him. “Unfortunately, if I don’t answer you within two or three days, it’s the same as hearing ‘no,’” he says, only replying to about 5 percent of his emails.

“There is no way in hell I can answer all my emails. That is unless I stop eating, stop hanging out with friends and family, and stop sleeping,” he explained. “Since I’m unwilling to do all of that, I only answer a few every day and have an out-of-message email that explains what happens to the rest.”

Jeremy Crisp, managing partner, Nail Communications
Despite him trying his best, Crisp says can never be on top of his emails.

“They haunt me. I do my very best to eliminate them,” he said. “But they’re like those damn minions …. endless. So I usually lose the day’s battle.”

Jason Peterson, chief creative officer, Havas Worldwide Chicago
Peterson believes that email is a dead medium and doesn’t care for it at all. The only reason he has fewer than he usually does in the screenshot below is because the agency’s server was recently reset, he said.

“I never check email — text me or come talk to me; email is an old agency excuse for covering your ass,” he said.

Rich Antoniello, founder and CEO, Complex
Antoniello is glued to his email inbox and also belongs to the “zero unread” emails camp, replying to emails from flights and if that’s not possible — as soon he gets off them.

Jon Haber, co-founder, Giant Spoon
Haber said he wouldn’t be surprised if he had somehow won a lottery and had no clue about it, since he’s trained himself to ignore seemingly superfluous messages.

“Honestly, for me, I am craving solutions to get off email,” he said. “We need email methadone; it is only getting worse.”

Whitney Fishman, senior partner, Innovation Consumer Technology, MEC
Fishman admitted to being on the obsessive-compulsive end of the spectrum, even using additional apps to sort her emails out in order.

“I’m a big fan of operational efficiency — so much so that I keep trying to find hacks and get anxiety if I haven’t finished looking at them at night,” she said.

Madison Wharton, chief production officer, DDB New York
Wharton blames her jaw-dropping number of emails on a glitch, but in reality is indifferent to her phone emails screaming out to be checked.

 

 

“As you might expect, I’m the 0 unread type,” Wharton  joked.

Homepage Image courtesy: Shutterstock

When Natalie Imbruglia’s hit single Torn topped charts around the world she seemed to be the golden girl who could do no wrong.

She’d made an apparently effortless transition from TV fame in Aussie soap Neighbours to become a million-selling pop star with platinum awards all around the world.

Natalie had fame, fortune and a striking beauty that won her high-profile admirers such as Prince Harry and Lenny Kravitz.

But today she reveals that at the height of her fame 18 years ago she was actually suffering from crippling anxiety and a form of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) that made her scared to leave the house.

FremantleMedia Ltd / Rex Features

“I was anxious, nervous, stressed out and scared. I didn’t want to go outside in case people recognised me,” she says.

“It nearly sent me insane. I felt I had to live up to Torn. I didn’t write it, but I was a part of the reason it was so successful.

“I felt so much pressure to live up to those expectations, then I was expected to top it. That was really hard for me.”

She felt so crushed by the pressure that as she toured the world to promote her music she blanked everything out.

“I was so busy being scared I never took time to see places and enjoy it. I was scared of losing my voice or being recognised.

Reuters

“I always took myself too seriously and could never really relax. It’s a perfectionist trait. I look back and think I should have just had more fun.

“I was too busy worrying about everything being perfect around me.”

It wasn’t a problem that went away overnight, but since turning 40 in February Natalie feels more content than before. She released a new album this summer, is working on another, and has a tour with Simply Red lined up.

And after taking five years out to retrain as an actress, she has rediscovered her love of music.

“Turning 40 was a good thing for me,” she says. “I’m happier than I’ve ever been, I’m more settled and I’m not trying to be anything that I’m not.”

PA

Raised in Sydney, Natalie joined Neighbours a month before her 17th birthday and played Beth Brennan for two years before deciding to quit and pursue a new life in London.

Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan had already taken the same path, and though it took Natalie three years to get a music career off the ground, success when it came was instant and overwhelming.

Torn, her 1997 debut single, sold a million copies in the UK and hit No 1 around the world. Her first album, Left Of The Middle, went platinum in only three weeks. But Natalie struggled to cope.

She explains: “I have OCD, which can be a problem because I’m not good with change. My motto is ‘No Surprises’. It’s an OCD from my mother. It is hard. In trying to control things it doesn’t work.

“I spent too long trying to please people,” she says. “My past record label made lots of stupid decisions, too many to mention.

Graham Kuhn/Camera Press/Retna

“If I’m difficult, too bad. It’s hard being a strong woman in the music industry and having an opinion because you are labelled difficult.

“But every time I’ve not followed my intuition and tried to please other people it has gone wrong, so what do you do?

“Ultimately I would prefer to trust my instinct and stick my heels in. It was a bit late to be worried about being branded a diva – but I don’t think I’ve always made the best decisions for my career.

“There was a big cos­­metics company, not the one I ended up being the face of, that I turned down because I didn’t feel authentic.

“It was a crazy decision. I was naive. I was just a kid and wanted to be authentic.

“I turned down massive campaigns in Japan as well, which I look back at and think they would have been so lucrative.”

WireImage

Along the way her five-year marriage to Daniel Johns, former singer with rock band Silverchair, was falling apart and they divorced in 2008.

A huge and controversial star in Australia, Daniel was known for outspoken comments about animal rights, experimenting with drugs and he suffered from depression and anorexia.

Nat says the divorce and her increasing dislike of being judged on her appearance both took their toll.

“I was going through some sort of body dysmorphia and it wasn’t good. There was always so much focus on the way I looked,” she says.

“It was pretty confusing to have people always asking about your appearance. The assumption was that I was there because of my looks.”

She adds: “Sometimes they get you on a bad day and that’s unfortunate. But now I don’t even notice any more.”

In fact, now she’s in her 40s she glad she won’t be offered the same kind of eye-candy roles as before.

“You certainly won’t be catching me in a bikini as a Bond girl,” she chuckles. “I haven’t got the confidence to do that. I used to hate getting offered sexy-girl roles. I always wished I was older so I didn’t get them any more.”

But her petite beauty has always attracted admirers and after her marriage split, Prince Harry’s appearance as guest of honour at her 34th birthday party set tongues wagging about a royal romance.

There was her brief fling with American rocker Lenny Kravitz, too, and she dated David Schwimmer from TV hit Friends.

Then six years ago, after a tally of two Brit Awards, six Grammy nominations and six million albums sold, she dropped out of the music industry and moved to Los Angeles.

She had continued acting in films over the years after a role in Rowan Atkinson’s comedy hit Johnny English in 2003, and decided to retrain as an actress.

She regards it as one of the best things she’s ever done.

Nat explains: “I had done Australian X Factor for a year and wasn’t really enjoying music any more.

“So I took an extended break and then realised how much I missed it. I virtually didn’t sing apart from in the shower for about five years.

“Music is a strange thing – if you aren’t feeling it you can’t force it. I just needed a break and it took courage to do that – and luckily I could afford to do it.

Now her fifth studio album, called Male, is out and she’s started recording the sixth. Her Simply Red tour starts over Christmas.

“I remember meeting Mick Hucknall when I was a teenager in Neighbours and he was touring Australia. So to think I’ll now be supporting him in arenas is incredible,” she says.

Meanwhile, offers of more work are coming in thick and fast.

“I’ve said no to a lot of reality shows. Financially it may have been silly but it just doesn’t feel right in my gut,” she says.

“But I’m still in touch with the girls that were in my group on the Australian X Factor and I care about them.

“The opportunity hasn’t come around again but I’m not opposed to it.

“I love The Voice too. I think Kylie was fantastic on it. I’m fully booked until Christmas but of course I’d be interested. I think they are both great shows.”

Instagram

Though they weren’t in Neighbours at the same time, Kylie Minogue, 47, has been a good support over the years.

“She and I have been friends for a long, long time, ” she says. “Us Aussies stick together. We are just like any other girlfriends on holiday – all subjects covered, put it that way.

“Kylie would be someone I wouldgo to for advice on a long career. She’s much more savvy.”

For someone who’s achieved a lot, it’s surprising to hear Natalie says she finds it really difficult to talk about herself.

“I once started an autobiography but I hated it,” she says. “I hated talking about myself so I had to buy back all the quotes from the journalist.

“It’s like reading your own diary back and realising how annoying you are. There’s a lot more interesting people in the world.”

That’s not a sentiment you hear too often from showbiz stars. And with that, I only want to talk to her more…

Picture this: you’re a 26-year-old woman who’s recently fallen in love with a man. He’s round your house right now. You’re still at the honeymoon, bodily-function-denial stage, so before he arrived you kicked yesterday’s pants under the bed and did some groundwork on your rugged moustache.

You’re discussing what to see at the cinema and he casually pulls your laptop towards him to check the show times. You think nothing of it. In fact, you rather like the implied familiarity. Then, when you see his jaw drop, you realise – he’s seen the sentence which you’d typed out in huge Helvetica earlier that day and left maximised on your screen: “Maybe I’d like to kiss Charlize Theron on the boobs.”

This was the most embarrassing moment of my life, but not for the reasons you might think. The sentence wasn’t a note-to-self, but rather, as unlikely as it sounds, part of exposure therapy for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

For 10 years I’d been experiencing obsessive doubts about my sexuality, as a symptom of OCD (otherwise known as the “doubting disease”). My inability to reach unequivocal certainty about my sexual identity left me as fraught and exhausted as the obsessive who can never be sure that the door is locked. The anxiety of not knowing was debilitating, and my compulsive answer-seeking only made it worse.

Exposure therapy refuses to indulge this compulsive need for certainty by gradually exposing you to triggers and encouraging you to embrace doubt. Your therapist is soon getting to watch sex scenes from famous movies while writing down lists of acts you might want to perform on the protagonists. And before you know it, you’re being prescribed three hardcore pornos a day – one to be taken before breakfast, preferably.

Undergoing such therapy while trying to maintain the mystique of young love is frankly nuts. My boyfriend knew I was having treatment for sexual obsessions, but when it came to the homework exercises I’d never told him the ins and outs, so to speak. To admit, in a hypersexualised world, that even the tamest sexual imagery made me anxious, felt inexplicably pathetic. Now here that truth was, uncovered prematurely, mortifying me. And here my new boyfriend was, very sweetly putting down my laptop and pretending not to be fazed.

Too late. I’d seen that split-second surprise in his face and it had cut me like a hot wire. I stomped into the kitchen – it’s a funny thing, embarrassment, so close to rage – and began furiously washing up. He followed me and tried to hug me and tell me it was OK. I squirmed free, unable to look at him, charged back into the bedroom, flopped face down on the bed and lay there, rigid with whole-body cringes and wounded slobberings of “don’t touch me” and “go away” into the pillow.

But such laid-bare embarrassments can themselves be therapeutic, as the American psychologist Albert Ellis understood. Growing up, Ellis had been acutely embarrassed talking to women, and had avoided doing so at all costs. Recognising that his avoidance only fuelled his feelings of embarrassment, he decided, aged 19, to tackle them head on. He spent every day of July 1933 in the Bronx Botanical Garden near his home, forcing himself, despite his seemingly insurmountable feelings of embarrassment, to sit next to women he didn’t know and strike up conversations.

“I would give myself one minute – one lousy minute! – to talk to each one of them,” he said. Over the course of the month he approached 130 women and found, to his surprise, that nothing terrible happened. “No one took a butcher knife and cut my balls off. No one vomited and ran away.” Building on such insights, Ellis went on to pioneer rational emotive behaviour therapy, which, among many things, encourages people to stop self-defeating avoidance behaviours.

Getting back to the boob in question: after an hour’s silence I pulled my squashed-flounder face from the pillow, took a deep breath and walked towards my boyfriend. I sat on his lap, looked into his eyes for a few wincing seconds. Then we burst out laughing. It was the first time I ever understood the ironic power of embarrassment to bring about new intimacy.

Since then I’ve written and spoken publicly about my obsessive compulsive disorder, and that has brought with it a million little cringes. Yet no one’s run away, no one’s vomited (at least not to my face), and every mortification, every sliver of honesty, has made me less afraid.

In the moment, embarrassment can hurt beyond words. But to be embarrassed is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability can give you wings.

• Rose Bretécher is the author of Pure, published on 24 September

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Tags: Health, Mental health, OCD, Paul Latimer

If you are troubled by recurring disturbing thoughts and feel compelled to perform repetitive behaviours, talk to your family doctor

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KELOWNA, BC Sep 10, 2015/ Troy Media/ – One psychiatric disorder that is commonly portrayed on television and in the movies is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

We are usually given a somewhat humourous example of a neurotic person obsessed with germs and washing, who needs things to be exactly in order or who repeatedly checks to make sure the door is locked or the stove turned off. A good example of this is Jack Nicholson’s character from the movie As Good As It Gets.

Although these characters can be funny on the silver screen, the real disorder is not a laughing matter.

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) affects between 1 and 2 per cent of the population and is characterized by recurrent thoughts, impulses or images that are experienced as intrusive or inappropriate and that cause anxiety or distress.

The disorder is split into obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are anxiety inducing thoughts and compulsions are repetitive behaviours or mental acts that the person feels driven to do in response to an obsession, and in order to relieve their anxiety.

A common example is the well-known obsessive worry about dirt or germs followed by excessive washing to remove contamination. Others can include anxiety that something bad will happen as a result of a forgotten action such as locking the door, which is followed by repeated checking. Counting, repeating, hoarding and endlessly rearranging objects in an effort to keep them in precise alignment are other examples of compulsive behaviours.

Unlike other compulsive habits such as drinking or drug abuse, the person suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is not repeating compulsions to provide pleasure.

Most people with OCD are attempting to ward off harm from their obsessive thoughts by repeating their compulsive behaviours. Some do this with regimented rituals that are the same each time, while others have rituals that are complex and change frequently. These rituals may give the person some relief from their anxiety, but it is temporary.

An important distinction needs to be made when diagnosing OCD. This involves the level of disturbance the obsessions and compulsions are causing. In order to be diagnosed with the disorder, the anxiety must cause significant distress and interfere with daily activities. Usually, compulsive behaviours take up more than an hour a day and can be much more time consuming than that.

Many people can be described as ‘compulsive’ simply because they hold themselves to a high standard, are perfectionists or are very organized. This type of compulsiveness can often serve a valuable purpose in assisting the person and contributing to self esteem and work performance. If extreme enough to interfere with functioning, it can constitute an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

Most people who experience OCD recognize at some point that their obsessions are excessive or unreasonable. Often, the individual is ashamed of these thoughts and behaviours and attempts to hide them from others. Unfortunately, this means that it can take many years before people seek help for their disorder.

Effective treatment is available for OCD. Treatment usually involves cognitive behaviour therapy and/or medication and helps most people resume normal daily activities.

While no single cause is known for OCD, it is believed that there are genetic and biological factors involved. Selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor medications are the most effective for this disorder.

If you are troubled by recurring disturbing thoughts and feel compelled to perform repetitive behaviours, talk to your family doctor. Help is available.

Dr. Latimer is president of Okanagan Clinical Trials and a Kelowna psychiatrist.

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