I knew that something was wrong.
I wasn't able to work.
I wasn't creating anything.
And a lot of these obsessions I was having
were sexually-themed.
You don't want to tell anybody this stuff.
You have no choice but to suffer in secret.
I'm Martin, I'm 32, and I've got OCD.
All through uni, I didn't have any troubles.
I went through film school,
learning how to tell stories and making people laugh.
I had the best friends.
I just fell in love for the first time.
It was great.
Obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD
is where you have intense obsessions about something
and then you try to make those thoughts go away
or try to feel better by doing compulsions.
You can get obsessed with anything.
For me, it was sexual stuff.
It was questions about who I am.
Usually, like, negative questions.
What if I am dangerous?
What if I've been born with some, you know,
(CLICKS) something wrong with my brain
that makes me a pervert, or
for lack of a better word, evil?
At the time, I didn't see it as a health problem.
I had this weight that I was dragging around everywhere.
And that no one else knew
and that I could never tell anybody.
You read the description of OCD and you think,
"Well, I'm not doing any compulsions."
But trying to unthink a thought,
negate a thought, trying to solve a thought,
what we call rumination.
Those are all compulsions.
So sexuality, which should be positive,
I had attached fear to. I'd totally abandoned sex.
I didn't masturbate for six years.
There was a time I couldn't even touch
my penis to go to the toilet.
Even something that unsexual, I couldn't do.
Years later,
my OCD pivoted into contamination concerns
and my hands were bleeding
because I was scrubbing them so much.
The washing of the hands compulsion
is exactly the same as the rumination compulsion.
It's just... it's all happening invisibly.
And so, you don't think it's there.
It was about eight years before I managed to say
any of this out loud.
Even being diagnosed as OCD
doesn't make the doubt go away.
Medication gives you some sort of support
so that you can then do the work.
It's taken many years of therapy and like,
changing my relationship to my thoughts
to get to the point where I don't take
my thoughts as seriously as I did.
Thoughts are not threats.
Feelings are not facts.
I discovered as time went on that
the more you talk about it,
the less power it has.
The reactions from people in my life -
friends, family, my bosses - has been 100 per cent positive
and not at all what I feared.
Talking about OCD and creating things about OCD
has become like an obsession for me,
in a good way this time.
That's become a new, great purpose of my life,
at least in this time in my life, is to use my passion
for storytelling to try to tell this very untold story.
People can live in that black hole period
for decades before finally getting the diagnosis.
And I want to save other people
rom going through that if they can.
Now that I'm on the upside of recovery,
I feel like I'm making up for lost time.
(LAUGHS)
I'm able to... (CHUCKLES)
go to my parents house for dinner.
I'm able to do something as simple as go to the loo.
I'm able to...
oh, my God,
go on a date.
Which is ridiculous.
A big part of therapy and recovery
is trusting myself enough to love again.
And it's a constant daily battle.
But I'm working on it.