So my friend and your friend Lily Bailey – author of the 2016 OCD memoir Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought and host of Wednesday night community resource, #OCDtalkhour - has got a new book out this week! It’s called When I See Blue, it’s in shops this Thursday on June 9th, and it’s a story aimed at children about a 12-year-old boy with OCD called Ben. I’m sure many of you listening to this podcast will think back to your childhood and remember how lost and confused you felt...
Jun 5, 2022
22 min
It’s been ages and ages has it not! Yeah, I never got around to finishing season 2 did I? Life – unsurprisingly for a dude with OCD – got a bit weird there for a while. I stayed busy working on my Substack – you should check that out, at spoook.substack.com, I write a lot about OCD there – and I kept making two of my other podcasts, The James McMahon Music Podcast and Shame, both available (as they say) wherever you get your podcasts. But my OCD got pretty bad. It was getting pretty bad arou...
May 16, 2022
13 min
On this episode of The OCD Chronicles, I’m talking to Dr. Katie Gordon. Katie is a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in cognitive-behavioural therapy, and she’s done research work in the field of eating disorders. So far, so relevant to both this podcast and my own personal journey... Katie is also the co-host of the Psychodrama podcast. And yet the main reason why I wanted to talk to Katie for this episode was to learn more about her new book,The Suicidal Thoughts Workbook: CB...
Sep 26, 2021
52 min
According to the International OCD Foundation, studies show that almost all (in 2011 the percentage cited was 92%) of OCD patients also suffer from at least one other disorder. Among the most common are Autism Spectrum Disorders, which is just one reason why I'm delighted to be talking to Dr. Joanne Limburg on this episode, an acclaimed Cambridge based poet, novelist and lecturer at De Montfort University in Leicester. Joanne's OCD and her autism, both of which were diagnosed someway into ad...
Sep 22, 2021
35 min
On this episode of The OCD Chronicles, I’m speaking to comedian and author Joe Wells. Joe wrote the OCD memoir Touch and Go Joe when he was just a teenager, which was reissued with new artwork and a few tweaks here and there, just a few months ago. Joe’s also one of the UK comedy scene's brightest and boldest comedians. It’s a big ask, looking at your OCD – or many aspects of neurodiversity – and trying to laugh at the preposterous of it all. But – I dunno, maybe I’m feeling in a decent plac...
Sep 5, 2021
30 min
I’m over the moon to get my friend and British comics hero Jamie McKelvie on this episode of The OCD Chronicles. It certainly took some tooing and froing - but I do think it was more than worth the wait. As well as being the man responsible for Captain Marvel's current cool as anything suit, and, with his key writing partner Kieron Gillen, a string of brilliant comics series, Jamie was recently diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve long thought that OCD and ADHD were shitty bedfellows. Very different c...
Aug 30, 2021
59 min
This week on The OCD Chronicles I’m talking to writer and OCD sufferer Yan Baskets. Yan has some story to tell - you can read his excellent blog at https://ocdetour.wordpress.com - about how, terrified that OCD was going to deny him all of the opportunity, hope and wonder that life can offer, quit his job, sold his stuff, and bought a ticket to travel to the other side of the world. Until COVID hit, he just kept on travelling, seeing, exploring... I’ve done my fair share of travelling myself...
Aug 23, 2021
36 min
You know what? I think this might be my favourite episode of The OCD Chronicles to date. In this hour plus long episode, I talk to American culture journalist Ilana Kaplan about her experience of living with OCD, depression and anxiety. We get deep into our experiences with mental illness - I shared more than I thought I would going in, but hey, someone might find it useful to hear - and how we manage to maintain both employment and relationships despite our undue suffering. You might call t...
Aug 13, 2021
1 hr 6 min
Jack Pridmore wears a lot of hats. Footballer, author, man on the telly, and an incredible advocate for the societal understanding of OCD. And that's not even the half of it! In this deep dive of an episode, I primarily talk to Jack about how OCD led to him stepping away from football - then a conversation about how I have come to accept the end of my career as a magazine editor ensues. I'd be amazed if Jack didn't end up on a future episode of The OCD Chronicles down the line. I feel our ch...
Aug 8, 2021
43 min
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