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The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought David Adam New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2015 336 pp (hard cover), $26.00, ISBN 978-1-2500-8318-0 Reviewed by Matthew J. Markowicz
David Adam offers a gripping account of a man with a family, a career, and a debilitating mental illness. The personal narrative he offers is enveloped by sociological, biological, evolutionary, and historical dimensions of the mystifying mental illness called obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Although we know the disorder takes many forms, Adam powerfully creates unifying threads that connect obsessive thoughts to compulsions to act. In this true-life tale, Mr. Adam is the man who could not stop.
The pull of the book, and the reason I could not stop reading it, lies in the rich juicy detail of Adam's horrific descent into and eventual recovery from obsessions about contamination with HIV. He tells his story with the objective...