‘Man Who Couldn’t Stop:’ A glimpse into the window of OCD

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $26

Eccentric and lovable detectives have become standard for so many police procedurals, and science writer David Adam presents a corrective to this popular image presented by germaphobe “Monk” and his idiosyncratic comrades on “Law & Order” spinoffs in the form of his new book, “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought.”

In his conversational and essayistic book, Adam explains how his own struggle — his irrational and unrelenting obsession with contracting HIV/AIDS — developed into obsessive-compulsive disorder, and how what began as a tiny snowflake — concern over a small graze on the back of his heel — exploded into a blinding blizzard that made it impossible to see anything at all. He explains how the mental flotsam of the day can balloon into epic proportions that entirely dominate his life. He is not referring to common preoccupations or particular tics — rechecking of locks, organizing pencils just so — that we all exhibit in some form, but rather those unshakable feelings and ideas that lead to misery and mental illness.

As a writer and editor at Nature, one of the world’s most respected scientific journals, Adam knew his fear was irrational and unfounded. He used his own experience as way to explain OCD, a disorder that scientists say affects 1 to 3 percent of us.

Adam reports from the forefront of neuroscience and explains clearly how the disorder and treatments evolved, and how the American Psychiatric Association had classified OCD as an anxiety disorder but now regards it as an impulse disorder.

It is a challenge to communicate what Adam calls a “severe, clinical obsession, a true monopoly of thought.” But Adam has a compelling description. He asks readers to consider a personal computer and the various windows and operations that can run concurrently.

The subconscious can toggle between windows, making them smaller or larger, or close them entirely. But OCD is an entirely different matter: “Obsession is a large window that cannot be made to shrink, move or close. Even when other tasks come to the front of the mind, the obsession window is there in the background.”

With OCD, it is impossible to hit “force quit,” but with style and wit, Adam explains how he readjusted the windows of his own mind, and how obsession can be reduced to reasonable proportions.