‘How easy it would be for me to stick this kitchen knife into him.’ Most people have thoughts like that. They are called intrusive thoughts. Most people don’t talk about their intrusive thoughts.
They don’t talk about them, that is, until psychologists take the trouble to ask. When they do, then survey after survey shows that about nine in ten people admit they experience intrusive thoughts that distress, bewilder, shock and perplex them. Most people have thoughts about driving their car off the road. A third of us say we have thoughts of grabbing money. More than four in ten get an urge to jump from a high place, an impulse so common that it has its own scientific name: the high-place phenomenon. Half of all women and eight out of ten men have thoughts of strangers in the nude, while half of all people cannot help but think of sex acts they consider ‘disgusting’.
Intrusive thoughts are everywhere. But it took until the late 1970s for anyone to notice, when the South African-born psychologist Stanley Rachman and his Sri Lankan colleague Padmal de Silva made a stunning discovery. In trying to understand the nature of obsession, the two realized that many normal people seemed to have the same kinds of strange thoughts and impulses as patients with OCD.
Their obsessive-compulsive patients had urges to insult and physically attack people, but so, it turned out, did their friends. The patients reported impulses to push people under trains and buses, to jump from high places and to deliberately crash their car. So did their colleagues. Both groups had ideas of violence during sex, had thoughts that they might have committed a crime they heard about on the news and harboured irrational fears that they might have suffered some contamination, such as from radiation or asbestos.
When the psychologists wrote down the weird thoughts harvested from the minds of their OCD patients and those from their ‘normal’ associates on index cards, and mixed the cards up, even their most experienced clinical colleagues could not correctly distinguish which thoughts came from the damaged minds of patients considered mentally ill and which came from the highly respected people they worked and socialized with.
* * *
My OCD began with an intrusive thought, a snowflake that fell from the summer sky. ‘Shall we go upstairs?’ the girl had asked me. She was pretty, with long black hair that she had to push back from her eyes as we kissed. The skin on her arms was smooth and her hands, I remember, seemed so small. She was older than me, though she didn’t think so. Her question: ‘You’re not a first year are you?’ hadn’t left me much room to manoeuvre. I had lied about my university course too. I knew nothing about the politics of the French Revolution but it sounded of more appeal to her than chemical engineering. I knew little about chemical engineering either, but then I had only studied it for a couple of months.
I was eighteen and a happy college student. Real life was on hold and time was a string of fun nights and daytime lectures on fluid dynamics and mathematics. I had little idea what a chemical engineer did, but I didn’t care. That was the future. And right now it felt good to think about only the next day.
It was November 1990 in northern England so she wore a baggy white T-shirt with a purple skirt over Doc Marten boots and black leggings. I was pleased with my newly-grown sideburns. I thought she might mention them as we stumbled through the dry sand of our early conversation. By the time we headed from the university campus and into the neighbouring maze of terraced houses I realized that she wasn’t going to. We walked and we talked, about music and our friends. We reached her house and, as she invited me inside and closed the front door behind us, a new world beckoned.
It was one of those frozen Leeds nights that Yorkshire folk are so proud of. The wheezing gas fire in her kitchen generated more light than heat and the cold chased us around the room like the smoke from a wood fire. Upstairs sounded good.
* * *
‘Did you have sex with that girl?’ my friend Noel asked the next day.
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘Did you use a condom?’
‘No.’
‘You could have Aids.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
Had I had sex with that girl? No. Had we used a condom? No. Could I have caught Aids? Don’t be daft. Still, I hadn’t even considered the threat, despite all of the warnings. I should be more careful next time, I thought as I bought Noel a drink that night. I should have been more careful. The same thought, an echo of our conversation – you could have Aids – floated back into my mind from time to time over the next few months, but on each occasion I could muster the mental puff to blow it out. Don’t be daft. Then, one hot night in the August of 1991, I couldn’t.
On holiday from university as I walked back to my parents’ house, with no warning the thought came again. You could have Aids. Only this time I couldn’t move past the idea, or the cramps of panic it caused. ‘Don’t be daft’ suddenly seemed an inadequate response to the scale of the threat, the possible consequences. I could have Aids. And if I did, then I was doomed. My life was over before it had truly begun. Worse, no matter what I did, no matter what anybody said, I could not change it. They could not fix it. I had lost the power over my own fate. As I tried to brush away the thought, the snowflake, it squirmed from my mental grasp and settled. Quickly it was joined by another, then another, then another. The blizzard that followed blew the snow into every corner of my mind, and laid down a blanket that muffled every surface.
I gulped for air when I opened the window in my stuffy bedroom. I heard the scratch on the ceiling of the summer insects when I turned out the light. I saw the red glow of the stereo, still switched on from when I had lain on the same bed that afternoon, which already seemed a lifetime ago. I ripped down the dog-eared posters on the wall in terror. Why me? I was so frightened that the tips of my fingers tingled. I remember I told myself that all would be fine when I woke up the next morning. That was how life was – everyone had night terrors and everyone saw things differently the next day.
The sun rose and the windows and curtains were still wide open. The thought was still there. You could have Aids. I went downstairs to the kitchen and had breakfast in the new world I would inhabit from that day, the first of the rest of my life. I watched my mum and dad gently bicker across the wooden kitchen table, and I thought how sad they would be if I did have Aids. I decided I would not tell them. I went back upstairs to my bedroom and buried my face in my pillow and wept. I could have Aids.
* * *
The obsessive thoughts of OCD are different to those that tend to dominate other types of mental anguish. Recurring and distressing thoughts are not always an obsession – at least not in the clinical sense. We can find our minds dominated by exaggerated and distressing thoughts of whether our child will survive and flourish in the world, for instance, or crippling nerves before an exam or driving test, but thoughts like that are in step with the rules and rhythms of our life. We want our child to be happy. We want to pass. We can think and worry non-stop about whether we might lose our job, but only because we know we need the money it brings to feed and clothe our family, which we feel and instinctively sense is the right thing to do.
Thoughts like that are ‘ego-syntonic’. They are in harmony with our drives and motivations. Ego-syntonic thoughts can make us unhappy, but when they do it is their contents and not the thoughts themselves that are the problem. We do not question why we have them. Indeed, sometimes we resent others who do not have ego-syntonic thoughts as acutely as we do. ‘I can’t believe you left this to the last minute.’ ‘It’s only been a month. Of course I still miss him.’
Taken to extremes these types of ego-syntonic thoughts can cause mental disorder, usually anxiety. But at their heart most concerns of anxiety are rational. So, usually, are the dark thoughts of depression: endless rumination on external events, regret of decisions and how life has unfolded. Severe grief, hysteria even, is based on the rational sense of loss.
Unwanted and intrusive thoughts, the raw materials of obsession, are different. They are irrational. They strike a mental discord. They are ‘ego-dystonic’. They clash with how we see ourselves, and how we want others to see us. Just to think these thoughts is enough to make us question who we are. We are not dishonest, yet we could snatch the money from that open till so easily. We do not want to be the dreadful person who could think such terrible and ridiculous things. But most people are.
Winston Churchill, a one-time First Lord of the Admiralty, didn’t like to travel by ship because of the ego-dystonic urge he had to jump into the water. Churchill was a well-known depressive but these, and similar thoughts he had of jumping in front of trains (he liked to stand with a pillar between himself and the edge of the platform) do not appear to have been genuinely suicidal impulses. Talking once of how he hated to sleep in a bedroom with access to a balcony from which he felt the urge to jump, he told his doctor Charles Moran:
I don’t want to go out of the world at all in such moments. I’ve no desire to quit this world, but thoughts, desperate thoughts, come into my head.
As Churchill observed, to have intrusive thoughts is not a sign that someone wants to act on them. A disturbing thought of sex with a child does not make someone a paedophile, just as an unwanted urge to hit someone with a hammer does not make someone a thug or a murderer. In fact the opposite is true. To consider such a thought or urge unwanted, disturbing and unwelcome – and so intrusive − is usually enough to show it is ego-dystonic and so contrary to someone’s normal personality and actions.
Where do these bizarre thoughts come from? The simple, if unsatisfying, answer is that we don’t know for sure. The theory used by psychologists who study OCD is that our brains have something they call a cognitive ‘idea generator’. On most other occasions, this generator helps us to solve problems.
To consider all possible solutions, it’s important for the mind to generate novel ideas and not immediately censor them. It’s a similar principle to a corporate brainstorm exercise and how every idea to boost sales or attract customers – however stupid – gets written on its own sticky note and given a nod of approval from an overenthusiastic manager. The cognitive idea generator does not have to anchor its responses to reality. Intrusive thoughts are what happens when the mind says ‘yes, and’ rather than ‘yes, but’.
Not all unasked-for thoughts are unwanted or unpleasant, far from it. Mozart revelled in musical thoughts he did not command. Beethoven said something similar:
You will ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot say with certainty. They come unbidden, indirectly, directly. I could grasp them with my hands; in the midst of nature, in the woods, on walks, in the silence of the night, in the early morning, inspired by moods that translate themselves into words for the poet and into tones for me, that sound, surge, roar, until at last they stand before me as notes.
Random inspirations of musical genius are all very well, if you’re fortunate enough to have them. But the thoughts most likely to make the rest of us sit up and take notice are odd and unpleasant. Those are also the ones that tend to stick around. Nobody gets obsessed by thoughts that they will be too nice to people, or by urges to give all their money away to a tramp. People do not complain to psychologists of intrusive thoughts of pushing someone with the build of a heavyweight boxer under a subway train. Intrusive thoughts bother us because the usual imagined victims are the small and the weak, the puny and the vulnerable; the child and the little old lady. It’s what psychologists label the Arnold Schwarzenegger effect.
This might make sense, given the theory that a mental idea generator helps us to navigate through life. We may consider it uncivilized, but there are some situations where a natural and useful reaction when one sees a stranger would indeed be to beat them over the head. The smaller the stranger is than you, and so the lower the chance that they can hurt you, the more attractive that option becomes.
According to the theory, sometimes an external cue – the rattle of a train or a dirty floor – can kick the idea generator into action, and make it churn out intrusive thoughts. At other times the trigger is internal – the result of stress or a low mood or a subconscious emotional shift, or the residue of an incomplete memory. In this case, the intrusions appear almost at random.
It’s hard to test these ideas, so there is no experimental evidence to support them. All we know for sure is that intrusive thoughts pop up more in certain circumstances than others, under stress for instance, and that when they do appear, how we react is critical. A natural reaction, especially if the thoughts will not recede by themselves, is to try to force them to go away, to squash the idea, to deliberately shove the unpleasant notion behind the mental furniture or under the rug. That’s a bad idea. That’s when the problems can begin.
* * *
Leo Tolstoy knew well the mind’s inability to repel unwanted thoughts. When he was a child, the Russian novelist would play a game with his siblings. To join a secret club called the Ant Brothers, whose members would discover wonderful things, they had only to stand in one corner of a room and try to not think of a polar bear. As hard as they tried, Tolstoy and the others could not manage it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a contemporary of Tolstoy, knew of the bear conundrum too. In his 1863 book Winter Notes on Summer Impressions he wrote: ‘Try and set yourself the task not to think of a white bear, and the cursed thing comes to mind every minute.’ A century later, that Dostoyevsky quote appeared in an article in the US magazine Playboy, where it was read by a university psychology student called Daniel Wegner.
Wegner, who died of motor neurone disease in July 2013 just as I was finishing this book, rose to run the Mental Control Laboratory at Harvard University, but he will always be remembered as the white bear guy. His work with the bears can explain why, even though we see a hole in the road ahead, we steer our bike right into it. It shows why forbidden love offers the most thrills. It can reveal why soccer players, desperate not to hit penalty kicks straight at the goalkeeper, go ahead and do just that. In 2009, he wrote an article for the prestigious journal Science titled ‘How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion’. Most of all, Wegner’s research shows why unwanted intrusive thoughts can hang around; why some people find them so difficult to brush off. It shows how we can turn them into obsessions.
In the 1980s at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, just a quick gallop from the Alamo and one of the last places on Earth that anyone would associate with a polar bear, Wegner asked some of his students to repeat the Tolstoy trial under scientific conditions. He asked them to try to not think of a white bear.
Students told not to think of the bears found it difficult. And students told to do the opposite and to encourage thoughts of white bears, of course, thought of more. (Wegner kept track by asking them to ring a bell.) Most surprising was what happened next, when Wegner reversed the tasks so those students previously told to think of the bears were now asked not to, and vice versa. Those students who had originally tried to keep away the white bears now found their minds flooded with them – more so than the students instructed to think about them originally.
It’s an experiment that has been repeated many times since with similar results. It is hard, if not impossible, to suppress unwanted thoughts. And to try leads to an increase in the thoughts later on, after someone has stopped attempting to suppress them. The latter effect appears in psychology textbooks as the rebound effect of thought suppression. Most psychologists call it the white bear effect – try to make an unwanted thought go away and it will bounce back, harder and stronger than before.
Anyone who, to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde, can resist everything except temptation – who has tried to give up cigarettes, or to stick to a calorie-controlled diet – will recognize just how hard thought suppression is. That feeling, the urge and craving, is the sound of the white bear as it paws at the door.
This ironic effect – that a suppressed thought comes back stronger – could underpin a range of unusual human behaviours. It could explain, for instance, why those smokers who are the most motivated to quit also seem to find it the hardest to give up. The brain could interpret intrusive thoughts about a substance as a craving for it. The more smokers try to push away the thoughts of a cigarette, the more they amplify their craving. Studies show those people who had tried and failed to quit cigarettes are indeed more likely to suppress thoughts. A similar effect has been seen in obese people who overeat: they are more likely to suppress thoughts about chocolate and chips, and so increase the craving for them. Suppressing a thought before sleep can even make it resurface in a dream.
What’s going on? According to theories of how the mind works, the white bear effect is down to two mental processes. First, people who try not to think of the white bear must choose to think of something else, and so they introduce and employ a conscious distraction: thinking about what they had for breakfast, for instance. But before we can introduce a distraction, we must know there is a target to distract ourselves from. So, before we can suppress a thought, we must scan our conscious mind to see if it is there. And to do this, we must think of what we want to look for – the white bear – which is the target that we don’t want to think of.
Second, a separate process begins to make sure that the target, the unwanted thought of a white bear, is not present. While this second, monitoring, task is automatic, an unconscious routine that takes little work, the same is not true for the distraction, the thought suppression. That takes real effort, and so cannot last. If the monitoring process lingers after the distraction process has ended, and psychologists think it does, then our minds will continue to search for it. And this means we will find the unwanted thought more frequently than if we had never tried to suppress it in the first place.
That’s not to say that intrusive thoughts can’t be banished, at least in the short term. Distraction – to keep the mind busy – is a pretty effective way to do that. But it’s difficult to keep up for too long. Markus Wasmeier could manage it for barely three minutes – just long enough for the German skier to write his name into the record books.
* * *
Stood at the top of a mountain in the early 1990s, Wasmeier’s teammate Hansjorg Tauscher was given the strangest piece of advice of his career. He was fast, no doubt about that – he had astonished the winter-sports world when he tamed the fearsome downhill run at Beaver Creek in Colorado to win the 1989 world championships – but his coach had noticed a possible flaw. ‘You think too much.’ Tauscher was quick in the turns, but he stiffened on the fast glide sections that linked them together. And while the groomed icy runs that Alpine racers hurtle down at speeds near 90mph may look smooth, up close they are a strength-sapping series of bumps and lumps.
As Alpine skiers crouch and let gravity propel them down the mountain, their minds can start to wander. Most do not wander too far. They start to think about how they could go even faster and as they do so they usually try too hard to control the actions of their feet and legs. The result: they tighten, hit the bumps harder and drag themselves that crucial fraction of a second down the leader board.
Juergen Beckmann, the coach, thought he had the solution. A former downhill racer himself, until a high speed crash almost broke his neck, Beckmann knew the mental problems of the glide well. Watching Tauscher practise, he decided to try an unorthodox control technique that he had picked up from research carried out in the 1960s on short-term memory. To keep the thoughts from his idle mind, Beckmann said that day, Tauscher should count backwards. When he started to glide, he should start at 999 and descend in threes. His mind and his thoughts occupied, the theory went, his legs would be more flexible and his run faster. Tauscher was sceptical, but he gave it a go. He disappeared down the mountain, mumbling under his breath ‘999, 996, 993…’
Today, Beckmann works as a sports psychologist at the Technical University of Munich. His research to help athletes perform under pressure is world famous. But it was his work with the German Alpine ski team from 1991 to 1994 that arguably brought the greatest success. As Tauscher started to ski and count backwards, his times improved. Pretty soon, the former world champion was convinced, and Beckmann, emboldened with his apparent success, shared the secret with the rest of the team.
That was when Beckmann began to work closely with Wasmeier, another former world champion, this time of the giant slalom event back in 1985. The skier was widely considered past his best and even Beckmann’s mother said her son’s work with him was a waste of time. Yet, at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway, Markus Wasmeier won two gold medals for Germany – in the giant slalom and the super-giant slalom. Against all expectations, he earned the unlikely title of the greatest German skier of all time and was named the country’s sportsman of the year. He then retired, to spend more time with his thoughts.
Beckmann’s backwards count was a form of ritual, which is one way to keep unwanted thoughts from the mind. Rituals are common, and not only among skiers. Just as most people have intrusive thoughts, so too about half of the people in the general population surveyed by psychologists will admit they perform odd and meaningless rituals. Some check the cooker is switched off when they know already that it is. They might give in to urges to tap a wall or count silently, or, if they touch somebody on the left shoulder, feel the need to touch them also on the right. These are not superstitions, which are typically a response to an external cue, such as a salute to a magpie. They are compulsions – an irresistible internal urge to act in a way that is irrational. People don’t tend to talk about their compulsions either.*
Most people seem able to cope with their day-to-day rituals and compulsions – or at least they do not seek medical help for them. But, like obsessions, for some people their compulsions can cause real difficulties. These problems, and the subsequent calls for help, usually come when obsessions and compulsions start to work in tandem. The combination can produce OCD. Put simply, most people with OCD develop their compulsions as a way to make their intrusive thoughts go away.
The most obvious way to employ a compulsion to drive away an intrusive thought is to use it to answer a question. If the thought that comes to your mind time and time again is about whether you locked the back door or not, then a compulsive and reassuring check on the door should settle the matter. More indirectly, some people use compulsions as a way to stop the thoughts coming in the first place. A 14-year-old girl with obsessive intrusive thoughts that worms would enter her body, for example, avoided the threat by refusing to open her mouth to speak for ten months.
Sometimes the nature of the compulsions seems to bear no relation to the subject of the obsessions at all. People with OCD can be compelled to tap surfaces or count or say secret words to themselves to ‘undo’ the imagined consequences of an intrusive thought, for example that their best friend will die. That might sound unhelpful, but then does counting backwards from 999 make someone a technically better skier?
Compulsions can make obsessive thoughts go away, but only for a short while. One of the many cruel ironies of OCD is that the compulsions, the weapon that obsessed people reach for, make the situation worse. Compulsions act in the same way as thought suppression. An intrusive thought silenced with a compulsive act comes back. It comes back hard.
Mental health professionals refer to OCD as a secret disease and a silent epidemic. The number of people who report obsessions and compulsions to doctors is routinely much lower than the studies of their prevalence would suggest. A lot of people with OCD choose to suffer in silence. Their thoughts are their dirty little secret. They believe they are freaks, and their silence has allowed compulsive actions to come to define their condition. Compulsions, a need to wash hands, to check the back door is locked or to turn a light switch on and off a dozen times, are visible in a way that obsessions – dark intrusive thoughts best kept secret – are not. Like the shape of the letter C in OCD, compulsions are open to the world; they offer a handle on the condition. And like the shape of the letter O, obsessions are sealed off.
* * *
While most people recoil from thoughts of unacceptable, distasteful and downright savage behaviour, not everybody does. Some people experience unpleasant thoughts in a different way; they do not find the idea of hurting someone ego-dystonic, it does not clash with their instincts and motivation. Some of these people, unfortunately, go on to act their thoughts out. We know this because some become sexual offenders.
Deviant intrusive sexual thoughts, which shock most who have them, do not seem to trouble such people. As ridiculous as it may seem, part of this is because they believe their crimes cause no harm. Some men who abuse children believe that a child can be interested in sex with an adult; some rapists believe that women enjoy it; some exhibitionists think their actions are harmless and even give pleasure because they do not touch their victims. Yet even people such as these, whose moral compasses are so severely skewed, can be troubled by their thoughts. Even these people have intrusive thoughts that they find unwanted, and in fact can cause them great distress.
Eddie was one of these. Eddie was 32, married with a child, and he was also a persistent exhibitionist. He would drive to a strange town and wait in a park until a woman walked by. Then he would expose himself. He believed his routine – which also involved parking some distance from the scene of his crime − would make it harder for him to be caught. He did it dozens of times. Yet despite the lengths to which Eddie went to avoid detection, afterwards his mind would flood with intrusive, recurrent – and irrational − thoughts that he would be identified. After Eddie exposed himself the first time, he had repeated thoughts that he would be arrested in front of his wife and child, and be named in the local paper as a sex offender. They occupied almost every moment and persisted for nearly a month.
Eddie was not unusual. Psychologists have investigated how intrusive thoughts occur in other sexual offenders, including child molesters and rapists. Frequently, especially at first, these people report persistent and intense thoughts of the consequences if they were caught. And it is not prison that they fear the most. It is humiliation and loss of status. They know full well that, even though they see their behaviours as normal, the rest of society views sexual offenders as monsters. This challenges their view of their place in the world. The thoughts about being caught threaten their own sense of themselves as a good person. They experience them as ego-dystonic. And as such they find them unwanted and intrusive.
* * *
Unwanted thoughts can centre on the most innocuous of situations. Plenty of people, for instance, report intrusive thoughts about the flaws of partners – boyfriends, girlfriends, wives and husbands. Now, nobody is perfect and a little tension is usual in all relationships from time to time, but in recent years psychologists have started to report a bizarre manifestation of obsessive-compulsive symptoms along these lines.
Here’s Mike, a 28-year-old married man:
I am constantly preoccupied with my wife’s emotional imbalance. She overreacts to every minor conflict or challenge she encounters at work. Every time it happens I think to myself ‘what kind of mother is she going to be’ … It really distresses me. I know all of her good qualities and I know she loves me. I know I am overreacting but I just can’t let it rest.
And Jennifer, a 25-year-old businesswoman:
I can’t stop thinking he is a loser and it just won’t work. Then I start obsessing about who will provide for me and the children … I love him and I think he will make an excellent father, and when I think about it rationally I don’t think it’s an issue.
In 2012, scientists in Israel produced a way to probe these symptoms. Called the partner-related obsessive-compulsive symptoms inventory, it asks people in a relationship to agree or disagree with questions such as ‘I feel an uncomfortable urge to compare my partner’s physical flaws with those of other men/women’ and ‘I am troubled by thoughts about my partner’s social skills’ and ‘I find it hard to dismiss the thought that my partner is mentally unbalanced.’ It’s easy to smile, but when such thoughts can’t be turned off then the consequences can cause just as much distress as obsessive thoughts of violence and disease.
Jack, aged 40, who had been with his partner for four years, was disturbed by intrusive thoughts about their relationship.
I check whether I feel love or not. Is this the same feeling as the movies? I try to imagine how life would be by her side in the next twenty years. I imagine how it might be with someone else. I fear I will be stuck with these doubts for ever and won’t be able to take it anymore.
Is this OCD? Certainly, Jack complains of thoughts that he doesn’t want, that recur, cause him distress and force him to seek constant reassurance. But it’s hard to see how many people, especially women, would have much sympathy. Does everybody who marries not have similar doubts at some stage? Isn’t this just a classic case of a man who fears commitment? If it is OCD, could and should it be fixed?
Psychiatrists are clear: OCD is not simply an exaggerated form of everyday worries. And it is a mistake to think that the apparently trivial subjects of some intrusive and obsessive thoughts mean they cannot bring serious problems. Bira thought only of a mud wall, and the consequences came to dominate her life. Mike, Jack and Jennifer all sought help for their obsessive thoughts about their relationships and the negative impact these thoughts had on their life. Their thoughts caused them persistent distress for several hours each day. That’s the OCD.
* * *
There will be some people who, if they have read this far, will have turned each page of this book with a shake of their head. Ideas to hurt children? Urges to drive my car off the road? I don’t have thoughts like that.
That’s certainly possible. Even the best conducted surveys that use trained and face-to-face interviewers come up against a stubborn 5 per cent or so of people who deny they have, or ever have had, unwanted intrusive thoughts. Some are probably lying, though psychologists won’t say so. There is a different explanation. If you are absolutely certain that you don’t have intrusive thoughts then don’t feel too smug just yet. Some people do have these thoughts, the urges to commit murder or to torture animals, but they simply do not recognize and report them as unwanted. To these people, such thoughts could feel as normal as to ponder what to buy a child for their birthday. There is a name for such individuals: psychopaths.
In 2008, psychologists in Canada published the results of an experiment that aimed to test whether psychopaths would report fewer unwanted intrusive thoughts. Psychopaths are broadly defined as people who behave in a way that breaches social expectations and norms, but who feel no remorse or shame when they do so. They lie, cheat and steal and can inflict great cruelty with no care that others consider what they do is wrong.
In search of psychopaths, the Canadian psychologists quizzed inmates of the Nanaimo Correctional Centre, a medium-security facility on the south shore of Brannen Lake in Vancouver Island, a local beauty spot and one popular with holidaymakers. One prisoner there told them he had thoughts about throwing a baby off a bridge, just to see the reaction of people, and another had an urge to perform his martial arts on someone for no reason. But almost three-quarters of the prisoners questioned said they did not have intrusive thoughts.
Were these convicts who denied intrusive thoughts psychopaths? The scientists asked them to answer a set of 60 questions, designed to probe people for psychopathic traits. It’s a self-report version of the so-called psychopath test. Sure enough, those prisoners with the highest scores on this psychopath test were also those who were less likely to report intrusive thoughts. If they experienced the intrusions and the impulses at all, they seemed less troubled by them. They did not find them repugnant, perhaps because they did not find the contents disturbing.
It’s possible that the prisoners were not psychopaths, just liars. Perhaps, even under the controlled conditions of an anonymous study, they were reluctant to admit their most bizarre and unwanted thoughts. Maybe they worried their darkest thoughts would be recorded and used against them. As we’ll see, they often are.