Word: ocd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first indication in the book of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is in the father. It later manifests itself in different ways in the other characters. Did you study OCD before writing the novel...
...library on 42nd Street in New York, this beautiful library. I used to go there and sitting in that reading room I just felt intelligent--"Here I am, I must be intelligent. Look at that ceiling, isn’t it wonderful." I was always intrigued by OCD because it's not a psychosis, It's a neurosis. So the person who has it, they know what they're doing is irrational, but they can't stop it. It's not like where you actually believe something, like a schizophrenic actually believes they're hearing things. They know they shouldn...
...nerves and tissue is also a veritable laboratory of chemicals whose workings and interactions largely determine the state of our mental health, down to the latest mood swing. Many mental illnesses once thought to be purely psychological conditions--among them schizophrenia, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and ocd--turn out to be caused by specific chemical imbalances. Those who suffer from them are racked not by toilet-training traumas or the "unceasing terror and tension of the fetal night" (as an early psychoanalyst put it) but by something as simple--and complex--as an imperfectly mixed chemical cocktail...
...breakthrough in OCD treatment came about in the late 1980s, when researchers discovered that a particular antidepressant, clomipramine hydrochloride (brand name: Anafranil), relieved obsessions and compulsions as no others did. The presumed secret of its success was its ability to inhibit the reabsorption of serotonin in the brain. A few years later, the advent of the ssri family made it even more obvious that obsessive-compulsive disorder was at least in part a serotonin problem. Some 75% to 80% of ocd patients today get substantial relief--sometimes complete remission--from one or another member of the SSRIS...
Recently, positron-emission tomography (PET) scan studies at the UCLA School of Medicine have revealed that either Prozac or cognitive therapy can actually restore normal function in the obsessive-compulsive brain. The scans have documented that ocd patients have abnormal activity in the head of the caudate nucleus, a part of the brain's deep-dwelling basal ganglia, coupled with unusual activity in the orbital prefrontal cortex, just above the eye sockets. The caudate nucleus normally acts as a gatekeeper, determining which thoughts, feelings and behaviors take priority. When it malfunctions, the "worry inputs" generated in the orbital prefrontal region...