Playing With Marbles

In pop culture, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD — is portrayed as a bit of a joke — a personality quirk bestowed upon characters with descriptions like: "uptight, neat freak... Type-A, anal... organized, workaholic." But it's more than having a preference for clean cupboards or locked doors. A little more than 2% of the population will suffer from OCD in their lifetime. And one of the greatest tricks it plays is making you believe, deep down, that you're a dangerous monster. It whispers that unless you perform a specific set of behaviours in exactly the right way, your worst fears will come true. And if you tell a single person — a parent, a priest, a doctor, a partner, a friend — they'll lock you up and throw away the key.

Everyone has intrusive thoughts! They're absolutely normal, even the weird, cringey, and uncomfortable ones. Most folks can shake them off easily. But for those with OCD, intrusive thoughts are "sticky." Horrifying, terrifying thoughts of violence or sexual deviance like: "I want to kill everyone in my family," or "What if I stabbed this pen in my eye?" or "What if I'm attracted to my mom?" The graphic nature of these thoughts, and the inability to banish them, can conjure so much shame and confusion that many don't disclose their illness at all.

There’s no such thing as being “a little bit OCD.” We toss around jokes like, "...letting the intrusive thoughts win" to describe shopping splurges or getting bangs. On TikTok, influencers describe "lucky girl syndrome," and "using manifestation" to conjure thoughts into reality. But outside of science fiction and fantasy, humans can’t magically think things into existence. And believing you have that power is downright dangerous when your thoughts are terrifyingly graphic.

We're talking to Anne, who lives with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She's going to tell us about her darkest days battling OCD, including the year she thought she was dead. She'll describe the complex, specific, and repetitive behaviours that her brain required her to perform to keep her safe, and to keep her from inadvertently hurting other people. We'll also talk to Dr. Jamie Feusner, senior scientist at CAMH, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and Chief Medical Officer of NOCD, to get the 101 on the strange neurological undercurrents of the OCD brain. He’ll also share some insight into a surprising potential treatment avenue he’s currently researching.

This story is personal. Our host Katie was diagnosed with OCD when she was 8 years old and is finally opening up about her experiences growing up with a serious mental illness.

So why does OCD exist? And can you ever get better? Tune in to find out.

Imagine having an illness that TV and film spent decades labeling as “dangerous” and “crazy”. This is what happened with Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID – it used to be called multiple personality disorder and you probably only know about it from the media. It’s stigmatized, misunderstood, and under-diagnosed.

DID is one of the most controversial psychiatric disorders. Some doctors refuse to believe it exists, despite well documented cases and its place in the DSM-5. Because of this stigma, it’s not surprising that people often feel like they need to hide their DID diagnosis, but if you only know about it from TV it could be surprising to you that DID might not be so easy to identify.

We’re talking to Nicole, who lives with DID. They are a three-part system and they’re going to introduce us to each identity that lives in their brain. They’re also going to tell us what it’s really like to live with multiple identities and how different it is to what we’ve been shown in the media. Nicole didn’t even realize they had DID until they were married and their partner started to notice something wasn’t quite right.

Brains don’t just create new identities for no reason, at least as far as we can tell. DID appears to be a defence mechanism. We’re going to find out how a brain can experience trauma so bad that it decides “someone else needs to deal with this”, and then creates that person in the form of another identity. Shari Botwin is the author of “Stolen Childhoods: Thriving After Abuse”, and a clinician who has spent over 25 years working with people that have DID. That book is full of real conversations between clinician and patients looking to understand how childhood trauma affected their adult lives, so she’s going to help us understand the effects of trauma on a person, a brain, and on an identity… or identities. Shari’s been on her own journey to recovery from childhood trauma and post traumatic stress disorder, so she knows it better than most.

Dissociative Identity Disorder sparks the questions… What even is an identity? How do we define who we are as a person? Living with DID is about figuring that out, and recovering is about bringing all those frayed threads back together into a cohesive whole. DID is not about picking your favourite part and ditching the rest, it’s about learning to love your whole self.

Having borderline personality disorder (BPD) means struggling to regulate your emotions. If depression sucks the colour out of the world, then BPD turns it right up until it’s painfully bright.

If you have BPD then you’ll react in intense ways to emotional triggers: You might get the wrong coffee order, and your inner monologue starts telling you that you were given a mocha instead of a latte because you are a bad person. It means your relationships are often intense and unstable – this is such a key part of the disorder that it’s part of the diagnosis. You might spend money impulsively, and your friends might find you overly generous with your gifts.

It can also be frequently misdiagnosed but, when it is identified, people with BPD are often labeled as “difficult”. This labeling and stigmatization of the disorder can feed into the looming fear of abandonment that is a cornerstone symptom of BPD.

BPD can lead to a very unstable existence. In the UK, where our BPD star Sophie is from, it’s actually called emotionally unstable personality disorder, or EUPD. Sophie is telling us her story, and how her BPD makes her hyper-attuned to the emotions of others. We’ll find out how BPD can be a defence mechanism by a brain that’s been through trauma, and we’ll learn about how it’s treated. We’ll hear from a doctor who knows what’s going on in the brain and can tell us about how people can get better. Treatment is a lot of work, with a lot of talking. Our doctor knows how and why the different treatments out there are effective, and Sophie’s been through the process.

This is a condition that remits and recovers. One of the features that defines recovering is being in a stable relationship, of any kind.

If you’re in certain corners of social media you’ll have seen videos about ADHD. There are ADHD influencers, memes, and endless reels of people telling you That One Personality Trait You Didn’t Know Is Actually Your ADHD.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder really is hard to diagnose. Many symptoms of ADHD are also symptoms of something else, and it often co-occurs with other mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. Studies have shown it’s potentially underdiagnosed, even as awareness rises and the number of diagnoses is going up rapidly.

Kids with ADHD might be labelled “bright, but a distraction in class”, but finding out you have ADHD as an adult can make you reevaluate your whole personality. You’re figuring out which parts are “you”, and which parts are a disorder. And isn’t that disorder also… you?

So what actually is ADHD like? McKenna is here to tell us about her experience of a disorder that can make you believe you are lazy, stupid and disorganised. It’s a brain that is chronically understimulated, and struggles to focus. It can be things that most of us relate to, like losing your keys a lot, but it can also mean your ADHD brain is incredible under pressure. A brain that is usually understimulated can thrive when everything’s happening all at once. ADHD is the inability to control when your brain is going to focus.

This all makes people with ADHD susceptible to burnout, which makes working really difficult, so we’re talking to researchers who know how to manage that, and McKenna is sharing her experience of being productive with a brain that doesn’t always want to be.

Anxiety is extremely common. A third of us will experience an anxiety disorder. It’s the most common mental health problem in young people, and it can make you feel like you’re going to die.. You know someone who has an anxiety disorder. Maybe it’s you.

It can be a normal reaction to stress or danger, but when anxiety becomes irrational, when the release of stress hormones is not in proportion with external realities, then it’s a disorder, and anxiety disorders have the power to paralyze a person between fight or flight. It can mean breaking down in tears because you want toast when your partner has finished the bread. It can be intensely physical, like a painful weight on your chest.

For Jess, a big part of her anxiety story was an eating disorder. This isn’t unusual, anxiety disorders also tend to occur alongside other mental illnesses. 25% of people with ADHD will also have an anxiety disorder, almost half of people with major depressive disorder have an anxiety disorder as well, and over half of people with OCD have an anxiety disorder.

So this episode of Playing with Marbles is going to focus first on Jess’s anxiety, and then on her eating disorder.

If this sounds like picking from a catalogue of disorders, found in different categories in a big book of mental illness… that’s because it is. If you’ve ever talked to a doctor about your mental health you’ll probably have had the experience of filling out a questionnaire. That’s the doctor looking to see if you match the criteria for a diagnosis set out in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (or the DSM-5. It can feel a little impersonal… but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’re talking to a scientist who can tell us why this method gets used, but also how they’re looking to move past a categorical approach to something a little more personal.

It’s not always easy to love your brain, especially when it can sometimes feel like a toxic partner. Your own brain can gaslight you and lovebomb you! But your cerebellum isn’t going to buy you a dozen roses or take you out for oysters and breaking up with your brain is simply not an option.

It’s also not easy to admit your relationship with your mind isn’t always great. Canadians are more likely to reveal they have cancer than depression. This affects all of us. Half of Canadians will have experienced mental illness by the age of 40.

Young people are especially vulnerable to mental illness. One in four young people need to access mental health services every year. Even if you aren’t one of them, you know someone who is.

This season of Playing with Marbles is all about young people who have a complicated relationship with their brains: six episodes, six people, six mental health conditions.

This isn’t your typical awareness campaign. This is lived experience alongside cutting-edge research. It’s how having a mental illness feels, and what is going on inside your brain. Playing with Marbles Season 3 turns the situationship between science and the people it serves into a loving partnership.

We’re hoping that by showing you that every brain is different, you can start to give your own brain the love that it deserves.

Depression is an extremely debilitating mental illness that can make it near impossible to truly experience joy and self-love. Witnessing children experiencing it, especially from a young age, can be heartbreaking for friends and family.

One in ten people will have a major depressive episode in their lifetime. It’s a leading cause of disability worldwide, and carries a high mortality risk.

It also might not look like you think it does. Depression is not being sad all the time. Depression can be soaring through the skies or cruising down the highway and everything just feels... fine. It's about seeing the world in shades of gray, even when your life is bursting with colour and adrenaline.

How are you supposed to love your brain, when it robs you of emotions?

Understanding it is a start. We’re going beyond conventional narratives with Tammy, our adventurous skydiving, motorcycle-riding, depression-having protagonist.

Tammy is here to tell us what it’s like to live with that absence – an absence that isn’t always visible. She’s going to show us how she came out the other side and started seeing life in colour again.

We also have researchers doing the scientific dirty work, so if you’ve ever wondered if sticking a stranger's poop in your own butt might cure depression… We speak to someone who can answer that question.

Come listen to Tammy’s story, and get a grip on depression, from brain to butt.

Let’s experience menopause, migraines, and Alzheimer's! Not exactly fun, we know, but they are very common complications of later life, so we’re going to get inside a brain that is experiencing them and show you exactly what’s going onn. We'll explore the benefits and risks of hormone replacement therapy and whether a cure for Alzheimer's is on the horizon. This is our protagonist Kira's swan song, we hope you'll join us as she makes her way through her last chapter.

Puberty, pregnancy, ovulation, even love… these are all things our body regulates with hormones, and brains love hormones. They are chemical messengers used by the body when one part wants to tell another what to do… and in this episode our protagonist’s brain is stewing in them like a squishy teabag.

For decades researchers used male bodies as the “default”, and this has led to huge research gaps in our understanding of womens’ brains. This lack of knowledge has real, sometimes deadly consequences when it comes to things like medication doses. So, we’re spending this season following one woman’s brain from birth to death and diving into what we do and don’t know about female brains.