Hiatus

I have pure O, or pure OCD, a little-known type of obsessive-compulsive disorder. People with pure O experience repetitive thoughts, doubts and mental images about things such as sex, blasphemy and murder.[...]  Purely obsessional OCD is so-called because the compulsions are largely invisible, and not often acted out in the more obvious, better-known ways such as cleaning or hand washing. Pretty much everything about pure O is secretive. These are things you're not even supposed to think about, let alone talk about. [...]  Sufferers of OCD will go for up to 10 years without effective treatment. I met a few in group therapy: a father terrified he might abuse his children, a young girl convinced she might burn the house down, a woman who thought she would run people over if she got behind the wheel. They shared my story: lifetimes of secrecy and ruinous therapy. Enter an online pure O forum and you'll hear voices screaming as if from under ice, spewing their obsessions onto the page or offering kind-hearted but disastrous advice to others. Week on week, in this country and all over the world, misguided therapists are systematically making these individuals' OCD worse.

Something broke through the terror - flickerings, fragments of his short life, the random events that delivered him to this, his moment of annihilation. As terror gave way to exhaustion, Babe turned to his attacker, his eyes filled with one simple question: Why?