Lily Bailey suffers from OCD and has written the book ‘Because We Are Bad – OCD And A Girl Lost In Thought’ (Photograph: Amy Shore)
A young model and journalist who suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) will be giving a talk in Birmingham this month, sharing what it’s really like to live with the mental health condition.
Lily Bailey has lived with the OCD ever since she can remember, and has recently published a well-received book on the topic called Because We Are Bad – OCD And A Girl Lost In Thought.
Lily will be giving a talk at the city’s Waterstones store in Birmingham on October 21, as she takes attendees on a journey through the darkest moments of her illness, before talking about the joy of recovery, and what it means to ‘be better’.
The talk is part of the Waterstones Read Your Mind season, a series of book events related to mental health.
OCD is a term often misused and misinterpreted as a quirky character trait that means ‘liking things just so’. The reality is however very different. OCD is a severe mental health condition, affecting 1% of the population and ranked by the World Health Organisation as in the top ten most debilitating illnesses of all kinds globally.
Sadly, sufferers currently wait an average of ten years before seeking help, and this is largely because the representation of OCD in the media and popular culture is so different to real OCD that people don’t realise they have it.
For Lily, the condition centred around an obsession with the idea that she might have done something bad, and a compulsive response to ‘put this right’ by making lists of all the things she might have done wrong (Photograph: Amy Shore)
For Lily, the condition centred around an obsession with the idea that she might have done something bad, and a compulsive response to ‘put this right’ by making lists of all the things she might have done wrong. These lists could contain hundreds of points every day, and all had to be mentally remembered and analysed. It came to take up every waking hour of her day. Lily feared that she might have killed someone just by thinking it, and that she might have committed crimes without meaning to.
These thoughts are highly prevalent among sufferers with OCD, but we don’t hear them spoken about much because of societal taboos. To get a better idea, you can hear Lily talking about her experiences in a short film here.
Lily Bailey will be giving a talk at Waterstones in Birmingham on October 21st at 6.30pm, where she will also be signing books (Photograph: Amy Shore)
Lily’s condition saw her drop out of university and spend time on a secure ward and two psychiatric hospitals, before going on to recover and start working as a journalist. Her story is something she wants to share with others, to assist those in the grips of the illness themselves, and inform those who don’t know how life-changing the condition can be.
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Lily Bailey will be giving a talk at Waterstones in Birmingham on October 21st at 6.30pm, where she will also be signing books. Tickets for this event are £3 and can be purchased here: https://www.waterstones.com/events/read-your-mind-season-an-evening-with-lily-bailey/birmingham
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