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WORK TITLE: Because We Are Bad
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 12-Jul
WEBSITE: https://www.lilybailey.co.uk/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: England
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 12, c. 1992.
EDUCATION:Attended college.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, editor, and model.
WRITINGS
Writes features and fashion articles for local publications in London, England, including the Richmond magazine and the Kingston magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
Lily Bailey is a writer and model who has also worked as a journalist in London, England, since 2012. From childhood, Lily grappled with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), a mental health disorder that leads people to be caught up in a cycle of obsessions and compulsions. OCD affects people of all ages and all walks of life.
“Ever since I can remember my brain has been flooded with weird and strange and uncomfortable thoughts,” Bailey told a contributor to the ABC—Australian Broadcasting Corporation website. Bailey’s thoughts would range from wondering if she could kill someone with a thought to what if her family deserts her at night while she is sleeping. “It’s a lot of mental chaos,” Bailey noted in the article for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Bailey had long kept her illness a private matter. However, she saw that most people misunderstood the disorder, prompting to write her memoir titled Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought.
Bailey’s memoir chronicles her battle with OCD as it ruled her life. By the time she was reaching her teens, Bailey had come to the conclusion that she was a bad person who had killed someone just with a thought. She also felt like she spied on her classmates and was spreading numerous diseases. She also believed she was sexually perverted. The only way Bailey could counteract such thoughts was to perform a number of secret routines. She eventually would begin making a comprehensive list of things she might have done that were bad. “It was a strange way to grow up,” Bailey told Irish Times Online contributor Arminta Wallace, going on to note: “And that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t recognise it. People adjust to all sorts of circumstances. It was just my life, and I didn’t realise that it wasn’t normal.”
At the age of thirteen, Bailey was diagnosed as having OCD. From this point on, Bailey focuses on how she coped with the disorder. Bailey, however, continued to struggle to the point that there were times when she thought she could not go on. The first time occurred in boarding school, leading her to go home, claiming a fake illness, and make the decision to just stay in bed. She got help and was able to continue through school and then go on to college in Ireland. In college Bailey initially found relief from the disorder as she developed a new set of friends and began partying and drinking.
Eventually, Bailey began to succumb more and more to the effects of her OCD. She would not use the communal shower in college for fear of spreading disease. She even went so far as to almost entirely quit eating to avoid using the toilet. She got caught stealing a handbag while out partying one night and ended up in jail. When she got out the next day, Bailey tried to commit suicide via taking all the pills she could find. Taken to a mental hospital, Bailey eventually returned home and began a new road to recovery. The process included a number of therapists and medication, as well as a strong family support system and concerned friends who also helped.
Bailey reports that she has gotten better but that the battle is not over for her. In an interview with Guardian Online contributor Lucy Clark, Bailey commented on the discussion surrounding whether or not people who have OCD can really get better, noting; “Personally I believe that you can, because I have seen other people do it.” Michael Cart, writing in Booklist, noted that Bailey gives “readers an intimate experience of living with the disorder.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Because We Are Bad “a harrowingly honest memoir of profound psychological struggle.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Bailey, Lily, Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought, Canbury Press (London, England), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, Michael Cart, review of Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought, p. 15.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of Because We Are Bad.
Publishers Weekly, February 5, 2018, review of Because We Are Bad, p. 52.
ONLINE
ABC—Australian Broadcasting Corporation Website, http://www.abc.net.au/ (May 19, 2017), “Because We Are Bad: Lily Bailey’s Tale of Overcoming OCD.”
Guardian Online (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (May 28, 2017), Lucy Clark, “Interview: Lily Bailey on Living with OCD: ‘My Brain Was Filled with Weird, Uncomfortable Thoughts.'”
Irish Times Online (Dublin, Ireland), https://www.irishtimes.com/ (June 10, 2016), Arminta Wallace, “Living with OCD: ‘My routines always came first. It could be 4am when I finished.’”
Lily Bailey Website, https://www.lilybailey.co.uk (July 7, 2018).
Psychology Today Online, https://www.psychologytoday.com/ (July 7, 2018), brief author profile.
Because we are bad: Lily Bailey's tale of overcoming OCD
Posted Fri 19 May 2017, 10:53am
Updated Fri 19 May 2017, 11:49am
Because we are bad: Lily Bailey's tale of overcoming OCD
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Lily Bailey grew up with an imaginary friend. It wasn't until she was 16 she realised the voice was her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
Warning: This story discusses suicide.
If you or anyone you know needs help:
Lifeline on 13 11 14
Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800
MensLine Australia on 1300 789 978
Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467
Beyond Blue on 1300 22 46 36
Headspace on 1800 650 890
QLife on 1800 184 527
It had occupied every waking moment of her childhood. She was convinced she was a bad person and would record a series of secret routines to try and redeem herself.
Through the rest of her teens and early twenties she tried to break free - she saw psychiatrists, checked herself into hospital, and even attempted suicide.
After a long battle, she got the upperhand. The UK model and journalist wrote about her struggle in a recently released book: Because we are Bad.
OCD, Lily told Hack, was like listening to three radio stations at once.
"Ever since I can remember my brain has been flooded with weird and strange and uncomfortable thoughts," she said.
"What if I kill someone with a thought? What if I think I want that person to die and then they do? What if my sister dies in her sleep? What if family leaves me in the night?"
'It's a lot of mental chaos'
There are two parts to OCD: the obsessive thought and the compulsive response.
In Lily's case, her most common obsessive thought was that she was a bad person. Her compulsive response was to write a list.
Lily gave an example:
She may be talking to a friend and thinking 'maintain eye contact' because if her eyes dropped down to her friend's boobs, that would mean she was a pervert.
But then she would think that maybe her eyes had dropped down.
So I would take the letter B for 'boob' and put that in a list."
Meanwhile, her friend would still be talking, and she might say something good that had happened in her life. Lily would think 'look happy, look pleased'."
"And if I didn't look happy enough I'd take the letter H for 'happy' and put that on the same list."
Then Lily might reply, but her voice comes out all squealy.
"So I'd take the letter S for 'squealy'."
Then they'd go for a walk and she'd wonder if she was talking properly, if she was holding her body right.
"So I'd take the letter W for 'walk'."
By now, from this 30-second interaction, she had a list of letters: B-H-S-W. She would repeat it over and over again through the day.
"So you can imagine all the letters I get in a day.
"It might be hundreds."
Where did it come from?
OCD affects about 1.9 per cent of Australians - equal to about 500,000 people.
A popular theory is that some people have a natural predisposition and then something happens in their childhood that triggers the disorder.
But there's little scientific evidence to back this up. There's no 'OCD gene' and brain scan results are inconsistent. There's no evidence of a chemical imbalance.
Lily notes that when she was a child her parents fought a lot, and she passionately did not want to be a bad person herself. She believed that if she did the lists continually then one day she wouldn't have to do them anymore, because she had learnt to be good.
So that may have contributed, but then she also remembers having the feeling that she was bad even when she was very small, before her parents fought so much.
The feeling may have had something to do with being sexually abused as a child - a traumatic experience that was left unresolved through childhood.
Lily Bailey.
Supplied: Amy Shore
But, ultimately, she just doesn't know.
"I lived in a nice terrace house by the park with a dog and had violin lessons and was quite middle class. I had hummus. I had a chalet in France."
"I didn't have some kind of horrendous childhood by any means.
"It's difficult to say where that feeling came from. Was it this moment or that moment? I think it's too simplistic to take a red marker pen and draw a circle round."
Getting help
Lily started getting cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) at 16. She learned to deal with her obsession as they came in and retrain her brain to respond differently.
Her imaginary friend wasn't happy.
"The voice I heard in my head was very angry about me seeking help and she went off in a strop and she was kind of gone."
"The more CBT I did, the more I was able to get a hold on the whole thing."
But, despite this progress, there were setbacks. At one point, when she was at uni, she decided to kill herself. The attempt failed, and she realised she had to get better.
In her early twenties, she began attending a support group. One woman there said she had found it useful putting off her compulsive routines. When a thought came into her head she would put off the response for half an hour. Then she'd postpone for an hour. Eventually she would be postponing indefinitely, and the thought lost its weight.
Lily Bailey.
Supplied: Mauro Grigollo
"I did find when you could put distance between the thought and the response, eventually it would lose its power," Lily said.
She found that being open about OCD with colleagues and friends helped a lot.
Also, when her dad bought her a dog.
"I really connected with this dog and I don't think anyone can underestimate healing power of having an animal in your life that you really care for and really cares for you."
"He's a really special part of my life and he keeps me going on my bad days."
Lily Bailey is the author of Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought, a book about her experiences with OCD, published in the US and Canada by Harper, in the UK by Canbury Press, and in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin. Lily became a journalist in London in 2012, editing a news site and writing features and fashion articles. As a child and teenager, Lily suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She kept her illness private, until the widespread misunderstanding of the disorder spurred her on to write her first book. Lily works as a writer and a model, and lives with her dog Rocky.
Living with OCD: ‘My routines always came first. It could be 4am when I finished’
One in every 33-50 people is affected by obsessive compulsive disorder. Lily Bailey's sinister alter ego convinced her she was a sexual pervert who was killing people and spreading disease. So how did she recover?
Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 12:30
Arminta Wallace
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Model and writer Lily Bailey recounts how her childhood was tormented by strange thoughts and rituals: diagnosed as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. (OCD)
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‘I can’t be sure that I came out of the womb with OCD,” says Lily Bailey. “People always say you can’t have it when you’re a baby – and for most people it comes on in teenage years, or young adulthood. It can also be triggered in later years. There’s a real mix. But I have no living memories of not having it.”
Bailey has written a vivid account of her life with obsessive-compulsive disorder and how she coped – or didn’t cope – following her diagnosis at the age of 13. Bailey, who grew up in London, would compile long mental lists of all the things she thought she had done wrong every day, from spreading disease to being a sexual pervert to killing people.
Bailey’s OCD took the form of an imaginary friend, known only as “she”, whose identity she experienced as inextricably linked to her own, hence the book’s title: Because We Are Bad.
“It was a strange way to grow up,” she says. “And that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t recognise it. People adjust to all sorts of circumstances. It was just my life, and I didn’t realise that it wasn’t normal.”
Some of the behaviours in the book start from a point most of us would recognise as “normal” – then turn the volume up to 11 and beyond.
The prayer Bailey offered up every night at bed-time opened with a common enough request – “Dear God, please protect our family” – only to escalate straight away into: “Please do not let us wake up in the morning and our parents have left. Please do not let the whole world turn to ice, so that we’re the only ones who aren’t frozen and we have to exist forever by ourselves.”
Though Bailey’s intention in writing the memoir is a serious one – she wants to help remove the stigma which, she says, still surrounds a disorder which affects one in every 33-50 people – her lively style and black humour make it, at times, a laugh-out-loud read. (There is, for example, the time her mum throws a Scotch egg at the car windscreen.)
But the circular mazes of thought she describes are, even at second hand, dizzying. Would it be fair to say that living with OCD is exhausting?
“The thing is,” she says, “I was so busy with it that I didn’t have time to be exhausted. I think it was probably a bit like working in a really hard-core banking job or something that requires you to work pretty much all the hours that God sends. People living that life, they get a few hours’ sleep a night and then they get up and do it all over again. And they can do that for years, right up to the moment when they think; ‘I can’t do this any more’.
“Mental illness is different for everyone. I am just talking about myself here. I didn’t have the ability to step back from it and say, ‘I’m tired, I’m sad, I need help’, or whatever. I didn’t feel particularly anything. I just went along with it.
“I had my routine of getting up in the morning, the obsessions came flooding in, I did my compulsions. They were the main thing. Obviously there were other things in my life – family and school and things that I cared about – but the routines always came first, and I gave every ounce of my being to them. So whenever I finished them in the evening – and it could be midnight, or it could be 4am – then it would just be, like, ‘Sleep, sleep, sleep’ for a few hours. And then get up and start it all over again.”
Did she ever have a moment where she thought, “I can’t do this any more”?
“There were two,” she says. “The first time, I was in boarding school. I faked feeling sick, went home, and then I just didn’t get out of bed.”
She got medical help and managed to continue through school and into college. When she came to Dublin to study English at Trinity, everything appeared to be going pretty well – on the surface. She made friends and, from her base in Trinity Hall in Dartry, embarked on a social whirl which involved generous quantities of vodka and late-night partying.
But Bailey’s mental state was deteriorating to crisis level. Convinced she was spreading putrefaction, she rarely used the communal shower. She stopped eating so that she wouldn’t have to use the toilet, surviving on the occasional bowl of Ready Brek. Eventually, she got arrested for stealing a handbag in a nightclub – “I got caught because, rather than bothering to leave, I carried on dancing with it”, she writes – and spent the night in a Garda cell.
On her release she took every pill she could find in an effort to end her life and ended up in a mental hospital. Her parents brought her back to the UK, where she began the long, slow road to recovery. Now 22, she is working as a model and journalist.
It seems like a pretty big turnaround. How did she get into modelling? “Well, I had been approached by agencies when I was younger,” she says. “But I was a geek and I just wanted to do my GCSEs and A-levels. Also, one of the big things I was worried about was being vain. It was one of my Big Three. I had this big issue with avoiding mirrors and compliments and that kind of thing.
“And I just thought, ‘What would be a really good way to kick that in the butt?’ Because that’s part of getting better from OCD; just embracing the things that you fear. And now that I am a model, I realise I’m not vain. I don’t think I’m seriously pretty or anything. I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror and I go, ‘Ugh, I look like shit’.
“I took this job the other day – a body-painting job. I had to be fully body painted as a robot to represent the over-sexualisation of women in the music industry. Which is just hilarious. Wankerish as hell but also kind of amazing.
“And the reason I accepted the job was not that I was thinking, ‘What do I want to do when I grow up? I want to be a nude robot and have my boobs photographed.’ But I was always worried that I smell bad. What better way to combat that fear than have somebody sitting next to me for, like, six hours painting my naked body? It’s the ultimate exposure therapy, really.”
For Bailey, recovery has involved a string of cognitive behavioural and other therapists – one of whom, named in the book as Dr Finch, plays a key role – as well as medication, group sessions and lots of support from family and friends.
“I’m a lot better, but I’m not completely better,” she says. “I have my group tonight. I still go every two weeks, and I look forward to it. I’ve got lots of friends there and it’s totally amazing.”
If she had one piece of advice for someone who thinks they may have OCD, or who has been diagnosed but feels overwhelmed by their situation, what would it be?
“What I would say, to both, is that getting better is really scary,” she says. “And that’s one of the things that actually stops people from getting better. People drop out of treatment all the time, it’s just so terrifying.
“But staying the same way is also scary. You can take all the drugs in the world, but there’s no quick fix. I know it’s bleak, but what I would probably say is, ‘Sit where you are now and picture the rest of your life living like this’. And if that inspires dread and horror, then there are two options. Scary option number one is: do the therapy. Scary option number two is: stay like you are.
“They’re both scary, but only one has a good result.”
Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought by Lily Bailey is published by Canbury Press
Interview
Lily Bailey on living with OCD: 'My brain was filled with weird, uncomfortable thoughts'
By Lucy Clark
Tired of people misunderstanding OCD, the UK model and writer decided to share her secret inner world. Here she answers 10 questions about the fourth most common mental illness
@lucykateclark
Sun 28 May 2017 21.10 BST
Last modified on Wed 20 Sep 2017 19.05 BST
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Lily Bailey, author of Because We Are Bad: ‘The biggest misconception about OCD is that it’s about being a perfectionist or liking things “just so”. In reality, OCD isn’t really about anything.’ Photograph: Brad Inglis
Your extremely compelling book, Because We Are Bad, details your life with obsessive compulsive disorder. You are 23 now and your book gives the impression it has always been with you. But was there any starting point as such, and if so, what was it?
I don’t remember ever not living with OCD. From as early as I can remember, there were two of me in my head, and my brain was filled with weird, uncomfortable thoughts. I heard my OCD as a voice – “she” or “my friend”. There was never an “I” in my head. It was always, “We should do this,” or, “We think that … ” It’s unusual to experience OCD like this, but not completely unheard of.
OCD differs from person to person – how did yours manifest?
For the purposes of making this easier to understand, I normally talk about things “I” did when I was younger, as talking out loud as “we” can be disorientating.
Compulsive behaviour? It may make more sense than you think
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My earliest memories of OCD centre around having an innate feeling that something bad was going to happen and that I was a bad person. In reception my teacher sent us all home with a letter, and we (“my friend” and me, henceforth throughout these questions called “I”) “just knew” that it was going to say something bad about us and that it needed to be hidden from my parents so as not to be in trouble. Other early memories include thinking my sister might die in her sleep, and repetitively crawling up and down the stairs to check on her, before praying for hours. As I got a bit older I started to have frequent obsessions that I might have done something bad and that I needed to compulsively make lists of what those things might be. I had bizarre thoughts that I could cause someone to haemorrhage just by brushing against them, or kill someone just by thinking it. Some of this may not sound like OCD to your average reader, but it’s important to remember that to have OCD merely requires that you have obsessions (unwanted thoughts and images) and compulsions (the action, whether physical or mental, that you take in response), and that they cause you significant distress.
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Tell us about the moment your interior world (what was going on in your brain) collided with your exterior world.
By age 16, my list making had gotten out of hand. To give you an example of how this might work – say I’m walking down the road with a girlfriend and I feel that she has come into my personal space, I would start to worry that I smelt bad, and that she could smell it. So then I take the letter S for space and put it on a list. Then maybe a passerby walks past and bumps into my arm, and I take the letter A for arm because I feel that I might have caused them an internal injury. Then a child goes by, and I’m thinking, “Dear God, please do not let me look at that child’s bum because if I do that it might be caught on camera and someone might think I’m a paedophile,” so then I take the letter B for bum. Then my girlfriend starts talking about a mutual friend, and I’m worried I pull a funny face and it looks like I don’t like that person, so I take the letter F for face. Then I’m repeating, SABF, SABF, SABF. That could be my list from 30 seconds to a minute, so you can imagine how many letters I could have in a day – it could be hundreds. When I was 16, I think I just got to the point where I couldn’t go on like this. I got myself sent home from boarding school, and basically decided to stop getting out of bed.
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What’s the most useful help you have received in dealing with your disorder?
When I came back to school I saw the school GP and was able to tell her a little bit about what was going on. She referred me to a psychiatrist for cognitive behavioural therapy. CBT is a talking therapy but it’s not really like traditional psychotherapy in that it is less centred on thinking about what happened, and why, and rifling around in the unconscious, and more about focusing on changing the current behaviour in the moment. It’s essentially about retraining the brain, and it is the first-line recommended treatment for OCD.
In OCD, it involves exposure therapy, where you feel the obsession come in, and rather than doing a compulsion like you normally would, you basically “sit with” that obsession. So for me, that might mean that rather than taking the letter S for space and wondering whether someone thinks I smell, I have to say, “OK, well maybe they do, so what?” Then I might have to take it a step further and not shower for a day, just to see how that feels. Over time I found that by doing this my thoughts became less scary – they lost their power. More recently, I’ve been having more traditional psychotherapy, which does involve looking back at my past more, and I’m finding it to be very helpful.
What is the most misunderstood thing about OCD?
The biggest misconception about OCD is that it’s about being a perfectionist or liking things “just so”. In reality, OCD isn’t really about anything. It just involves having obsessions and compulsions, and only some people with OCD have the straightening and tidying compulsions that we traditionally associate with OCD. Also people seem to think that OCD is a cute “quirk” – many take pride in being “soooo super OCD about their pencil case”. But OCD is not enjoyable – if you “totally love being OCD” then you do not have OCD. One of the criteria for having OCD is that you spend more than an hour a day doing it. The World Health Organisation has ranked OCD in the top 10 most disabling illnesses of any kind globally.
What has OCD taught you about human nature?
That brains are right complex. And that you never know what someone’s going through behind the smile.
Your book is deeply personal. Is it difficult having people know so much about you and the secret thoughts that made you think you were a terrible person?
Yes! I started dating this guy and he was all, “So shall I read the book or not?” And I was like, “Dear God, please DO NOT read the book!” Not that I wouldn’t have wanted to tell him about what I go through in time, but if someone I care about is going to find out that I worry about people thinking I’m a sexual predator, I’d kind of rather they heard it from me.
What did you want to achieve by writing it?
Well it’s unlikely you’re going to write something so exposing without very good reason. I had just gotten to a point where I was really tired of people having such a limited understanding of what it really means to have OCD. OCD is the fourth most common mental health condition, yet most people have no idea about how it actually works. I get really annoyed that I had no idea about any of this stuff when I was younger, and therefore I never told anyone. I didn’t know because my only understanding of OCD was that it involved being a perfectionist. So when people use the phrase in the wrong way, it literally costs people years of their life, because it stops them having any real understanding of what they’re going through and getting help.
My son’s struggle with OCD showed me the unfairness people with mental illness face
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You talk about “getting better”. Is it something you can completely recover from?
People are really, really, divided on this. It tends to be that the people who have gotten better say, “Yes you can!,” and the ones who haven’t will say, “No, you never really do.” Personally I believe that you can, because I have seen other people do it. So if I’ve seen something happen, then I’m going to believe it, right? I can’t see a plane flying in the sky and then deny that aviation is a thing. But I also acknowledge that it doesn’t happen for everyone, and that we don’t really know why that is.
What’s the best bit advice you can give to someone living with OCD?
Feel the fear, and do it anyway!
Lily Bailey is a model and writer. She became a journalist in London in 2012, editing a news site and writing features and fashion articles for local publications including the Richmond Magazine and the Kingston Magazine. As a child and teenager, Lily suffered from severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). She kept her illness private, until the widespread misunderstanding of the disorder spurred her on to write her first book, Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought. Lily lives in London with her dog, Rocky.
Because We Are Bad: 0CD and a Girl Lost in Thought
Michael Cart
Booklist. 114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p15.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Because We Are Bad: 0CD and a Girl Lost in Thought. By Lily Bailey. Apr. 2018. 272p. Harper, $26.99 (9780062696168). 810.
Bailey is 16 when she is diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. "I make lists of everything I've done that might be wrong," she tells her mother, explaining that she obsessively repeats them over and over to analyze them. She feels the need to be perfect, but the fact is that, since she was a little girl, she has felt she is bad. Not only her but the second Lily who lives in her head, who tells her what to do. "I'm nothing without her," she confesses to her therapist. That will be put to the test when her "friend" suddenly leaves her. She is bereft but continues her obsessive behavior until her condition becomes unbearable, and she attempts suicide. In the wake of her attempt, she is institutionalized, but nothing seems to help until something--a support group--begins to make a difference. Bailey is unsparing in her well-written memoir of her struggles with OCD, giving readers an intimate experience of living with the disorder. Her account focuses much-needed light on a condition that demands to be better understood.--Michael Cart
YA: Bailey's often emotional account of her teenage struggles with mental illness will likely resonate with YAs. MC.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cart, Michael. "Because We Are Bad: 0CD and a Girl Lost in Thought." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 15. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250792/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1753f28d. Accessed 23 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250792
Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought
Publishers Weekly. 265.6 (Feb. 5, 2018): p52+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought
Lily Bailey. Harper, $26.99 (272p) ISBN 978-006-269616-8
London-based model and journalist Bailey offers an authentic and stunning account of her struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder in this beautifully-rendered memoir. Readers may initially wonder why the narrator often refers to herself as "we," but will soon realize that the dueling voice inside Bailey's head is an imaginary "friend" who reinforces intrusive thoughts, feeding into the author's feelings of unworthiness. Bailey has a supportive family; though her parents divorce, they are committed to helping their daughter, who is diagnosed with OCD as a teen. Bailey does well in school (especially after receiving extra time for tests), but her interior dialogue is rife with worry and self-blame; it takes hours to fall asleep at night due to her analysis of intricate lists of perceived mistakes she's made each day, along with her various routines (for example, tiptoeing into her sister's room to see if she's still breathing). Under the care of a psychiatrist, Bailey improves, but while attending college in Dublin she backslides and attempts suicide. Bailey is a vulnerable, vibrant, and courageous narrator. Daniel Lazar, Writers House. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought." Publishers Weekly, 5 Feb. 2018, p. 52+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526810425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ffa86a6e. Accessed 23 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526810425
Bailey, Lily: BECAUSE WE ARE BAD
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bailey, Lily BECAUSE WE ARE BAD Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 4, 3 ISBN: 978-0-06-269616-8
A British model and writer's account of how she learned to live with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
As a child, the author privately referred to herself as "we." However, the girl that "shared" Bailey's mind was no imaginary friend: she was the "other" who drove her to check on her sleeping sister several times a night, wash her hands to rawness, and mentally repeat elaborate "prayer[s]." She existed to ensure that Bailey carried out rituals as "protection against everything going wrong" and make up for all her real and imagined mistakes, from killing someone with a thought to spreading deadly disease. As Bailey grew up, her secret "other" became increasingly exacting and onerous: "she [was] a banshee...a spoiled child demanding the whole of me." By the time the author was an adolescent, her "double" made her recite long strings of letters in her head, each of which stood for the first letter of an action (such as staring) or a thing (such as bad breath) for which she sought retribution. Bailey finally revealed her list-making habit to a school doctor, who referred her to a psychiatrist named Dr. Finch. Intensive therapy helped the author free herself from her "other," whom she then "replaced" with her doctor. Determined to free herself from dependence on Dr. Finch, the author severed their connection and stopped taking medication after leaving England to attend college in Ireland. The result was a first term characterized by heavy drinking, shoplifting, and attempted suicide. Only after returning to London to face her demons and work through transference issues with her psychiatrist was Bailey finally able to find relief from her overactive mind and the underlying anxiety that had defined her life. In her courageous book, the author offers compelling insight into the pain and destructive power of OCD as well as the resilience of a young woman determined to beat the odds.
A harrowingly honest memoir of profound psychological struggle.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bailey, Lily: BECAUSE WE ARE BAD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461323/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2f469e52. Accessed 23 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461323