ADAM SHAW: I felt I was gonna kill people,
I was gonna strangle people. It was constant mental torture.
ADAM SHAW: I have crossed this bridge many
times since it happened in a car, but I have not actually gone past, walked past this.
So this is the first time I have been back since the night really that changed my life.
COMM: After suffering from obsessive compulsive
disorder for all his life, Adam was left exhausted by the years spent trying to fight his thoughts,
concluding the only way out was to commit suicide.
ADAM SHAW: I was so tired of the battle. I
was so scared of my thoughts. I had a breakdown of epic proportions. There was just nowhere
to go from it. And I sat on the bridge and that was it. I was going to end it.
COMM: Adam’s obsessive thoughts had started
in childhood but as he got older they became progressively worse.
ADAM SHAW: My fear was, you know, seeing in
the news, people being killed, people being murdered. Overnight, I thought I was gonna
be a murderer and I thought I was gonna strangle people, I thought I was gonna stab people.
And it wasn’t that I just thought it. I felt I was having urges to do it. I had convinced
myself that I was having urges to strangle people, urges to kill people. And beating
myself up about it, thinking, “You’re such a horrible guy, you are gonna end up
in prison, you are gonna, you know, your family are gonna be disgraced by it.” I didn’t
realise all this is a mental health problem. I thought, “I’m a killer. I’m a psychopath.”
COMM: Adam became so worried about acting
on his thoughts that he developed ritualistic safety mechanisms to help him keep them at bay.
ADAM SHAW: I would carry a pair of handcuffs
in my pocket permanently and I couldn’t leave the house without them. They became
a part of my life and the whole point of me having handcuffs was to alleviate the worry
or the process that I was going to kill somebody. And whenever I had a thought, an OCD thought
coming to my head, I had to put my hands in my pocket to check they were there.
ALISSA SHAW: Is it not nice?
COMM: He didn’t even tell his wife Alissa
how much he was struggling until he had a breakdown on their first family holiday.
ALISSA SHAW: We’ve gone to the Canary Islands
and he was in the bedroom, he came out, just in floods of tears and I was like, “What’s
wrong? What’s wrong?” I didn’t know what was happening? First thought was, you
know, is he seeing someone else and he’s decided to tell me here, you know. Or what
if something is wrong with him physically? And then he started to explain a little about,
you know, what was happening. He didn’t know himself. So there was only so much he
could tell me. I was totally totally blown away when everything came to light and he started
to explain what was happening.
COMM: After his holiday, Adam met with a therapist,
who finally diagnosed him with OCD.
ADAM SHAW: First time really that I’d had
a diagnoses for what was wrong with me. I was told that, “Adam you aren’t an evil
person. You aren’t actually going to carry out these thoughts.” He wanted me to stay
on and do more therapy with him, because we just scratched the surface there. But I was
convinced that I was fine. But what I did do and I made a massive mistake is I didn’t
carry on with the therapy.
COMM: And so from the outside, Adam looked
like someone who had it all - a loving family, a successful business and a stunning house.
But it wasn’t the case.
ALISSA SHAW: In the times where things weren’t
so bad, in between what I called the serious episodes, we’d just go on with day to day
life. He would have times, ups and downs of course, that we just sort of dealt with. But
then during the serious episodes, the times where he was very poorly, it did put strain
on us. Your whole life is turned upside down. Me and Adam have always been best friends
and you kind of lose your best friend for a while, because they are not capable of being
it, you know.
ADAM SHAW: I have sometimes pretended to be
in bed asleep, my son’s been knocking on the door to come out and play, because I was
depressed and I missed out on things. I missed out on birthday events, because I didn’t
want to be around people.
COMM: When Adam suffered his biggest breakdown,
at the time he thought the only way out was to take his own life.
ADAM SHAW: I’m sat on a bridge and I’m
about to end it all. And it’s like these thoughts cannot hurt me anymore. I’m relieving
myself of it. And I felt so relaxed and I never ever had that moment. But I felt how
sad is that. Why can’t you have those sensations in the real world, there must be a way and
it was that moment that I thought there was still hope.
COMM: It was then that Adam met with Dr. Lauren
Callaghan, a leading psychologist specialising in complex anxiety disorders.
ADAM SHAW: All the rituals, all the thoughts,
all the thinking, has it ever worked? I said, “No”. She said, “You have been running
away, you have been battling with them, you have been ritualising with them, you have
put them up on a pedestal. You give them more power than actually what they deserve and
by giving that power, they have ruled your life. I want you to accept you have these
thoughts. I want you to accept them for what they are and let them in”.
COMM: After working with Dr. Callaghan, Adam’s
life was transformed and so together they wrote a book on how to live with OCD and established
The Shaw Mind Foundation.
ADAM SHAW: We help people get back into work,
who have lost their job for mental health problems. We support children who have got
parents with mental health problems. We help those, who are in desperate situations with
different projects.
ADAM SHAW: I will always have OCD traits,
that’s part of who I am. Will I ever be in a position where I’m on a bridge again
or where I’m, you know, distressed by my thoughts? No. I think I’m more mentally
positive and more mentally healthy than people who have not had any mental health problems,
because I have learnt to understand my mind. I have learnt to understand, to see how strong
I was to go through what I went through, to know that I survived every day.