My name is Colin Putney, I'm 49 years old and I'm different because I suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
It's as if someone's putting a gun to your head, cocking the trigger and threatening to pull the trigger unless you do precisely what you’re being told to do.
You had to wash your hands a certain amount of times, you had to open and close windows and turn light switches on and off a certain amount of times.
If you didn't do these you were threatened that something terrible, cataclysmic, awful was going to happen or harm would come to yourself or your family.
I know logically it can't be the case but the feeling part of me tells me that it is the case. So if for example, I push in to someone inadvertently on the tube, then my immediate thought is that that person is going to harm me in some kind of way.
Very occasionally it goes away all together which is such a luxury and when that happens, you actually look around inside your head and think "where have the thoughts gone?"
But generally you're being sniped at and attacked by OCD a lot of your waking day. I started getting OCD thoughts when I was about 5.
I remember clearly my friends all running down Finchley Road and me being stuck by a tree, touching a leaf a certain amount of times.
And my friends all saying "come on, come on, what’s wrong with you?" I said I was looking at an insect or something like that but you become a very good actor and you become very elaborate in covering up your OCD.
I resented being pushed around by this monster, so I used to have a little mantra "who is running your life, OCD or you?"
I went into a toilet, I held onto the toilet seat. It's the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life and I physically restrained myself from doing the rituals.
I realised that I needed professional help with my OCD. I was so desperate that I looked up psychiatrist in the Yellow Pages.
The treatment of choice for OCD was to snap a rubber band on your wrist every time you got an OCD thought and this was supposed to make them go away. Now that is positively idiotic but in the 80's that was as good as it gets.
The thing that strikes you is the sheer utter and total pointlessness of it all. I was recording thought levels of 400 OCD thoughts a day.
It quite literally brings you to your knees. It's rather like a glitch in a computer program that you can't get rid of.
Maybe one day there'll be a pill and you just swallow this pill and the OCD thoughts all vanish but that doesn't appear to be in the near or even middle future.
So I guess that all I can do is to cope with them as best I can, manage them as best I can and count myself lucky that, occasionally I get a bit of piece and quiet.
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