I would learn that my tendency had a name—obsessive-compulsive disorder—and that I had carried this sickness since childhood. My problem is that I seek control where I have little or none. A part of me sincerely believes that knowledge is a form of power; that to learn about the horrors for which I am destined is a way of preempting them. OCD is a disease of logic, for I am at my most impeccably logical when I am charting the series of misfortunes that could spell my end. (Foucault: “The marvelous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly.”)

For The Point, I wrote about neurodiversity, anti-psychiatry and the connection between mental illness and social order. (2020)