About me

In 2005 I wrote my first and so far only book, Touch and Go Joe about my own experiences of suffering from OCD as a teenager. Since then I have travelled about giving talks about OCD (you might have seen me at the OCD action conference last year) and done lots of different media things. The point of the book, or at least one of many points the book had set out to make was that there was a human face to OCD. In telling my own story of my life with OCD I intended to write a book which was different to other books about OCD, which did not talk about OCD in general terms but showed it as an illness which people suffered from.

I felt like I achieved that to some degree, but I only showed the OCD which effected one person, myself. This is the reasoning behind my next project, a film entitled One Point Eight. One Point Eight is a documentary project which I am Co-Directing with film maker Matthew Harrison. We are currently looking for as many OCD sufferers as possible to let us interview them, but there is a twist. We don’t want these interviews to focus on OCD, we want the main focus of these interviews to be about ‘what makes us us’. maybe it’s a passion for music, The interviewee’s relationships with their friends and family? or their career? OCD will be a footnote to contextualise the interviews next to footage of my lecturing. But the purpose of the interviews will to put that human face to the 1.8% of people who suffer from OCD.

If anyone is interested in this project, drop me an email on touchandgojoewells@msn.com

Joe