Author: Liz Smith

Have you found yourself marveling at how teens can produce videos and images with filters and effects at hyper-speed just with their smartphones? Tech has given this generation of teens an incredible suite of creative tools at their fingertips and they appear to have a genetic ability to learn how to use them with impressive ease. They’re leading the way when it comes to visual communication and creating a whole new aesthetic. But what is tech doing to their creative writing and thinking skills?

This video clip is from two contributors to Swipe Left For Addiction. Laura has been an English teacher in the UK for 13 years. In recent years she has seen a decline in creative writing skills and she suspects smartphones and mobile devices may have something to do with it.

“If you never look outside the window and just sit and daydream and soak up the…

I was lucky enough to find myself on a beautiful island in Thailand last winter and I remember being struck by the sight of a group of young backpackers sitting together at the local beach bar at sunset. Each of them were swiping and tapping their phones, they weren’t talking to each other and they certainly weren’t watching the sunset. The local hotelier told us he had nearly had a riot on his hands the previous week when the internet had been out for a couple of days due to a storm. This was paradise on earth but most of the guests weren’t there, they were somewhere else, they were in screen world. I hear similar stories all the time, it’s the new norm, so who can blame Kai featured in this video clip for preferring his room with a wifi connection over the beach without wifi? At least he…

The Secret Illness is creating a verbatim theatre piece and you can be a part of it’s creation!

Verbatim theatre is a form of documented theatre in which plays are constructed from the precise words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic.

We want to create our verbatim theatre piece from intrusive thoughts submitted by people living with OCD from The Secret Illness community.

To be a part of this all you need to do is send an email to salon@thesecretillness.com with one, or several, intrusive thoughts you battle with, or have battled with in the past. Single sentences please. We need a mix of the mundane and the unusual. All submissions will be kept anonymous.

Working with the intrusive thoughts you send us, and others taken from the Wall Posts, we will workshop them with actors and through that process produce a theatrical piece.

We will have our first opportunity…

OCD Community Co-Creation, United Kingdom

At the 2018 OCDAction conference we put a call out to those attending to come to the Secret Illness Art Desk and take part in making a co-created collage. The contributors selected images and words from magazines and newspapers that were an expression of their OCD or intrusive thoughts. This was the outcome.

The Secret Illness began in Summer 2015 with a simple aim, to explore the realities of living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) through the creative arts. We did not know what would come out of it, if anything at all. It’s World Mental Health Day today so we wanted to share this video with you that takes a look back at what The Secret Illness community has achieved over the last 3 years and shows how incredibly powerful and empowering creativity can be.

In August 2015 the first post went live on The Secret Illness Wall. There are now 150 Wall Posts, each one a personal story of how OCD affects them.

Up until recently The Wall had only existed in an online space but at the OCD Action annual conference in March 2018, we were able to create the first ever interactive exhibition based on The Wall.

Here is a short video about The Wall Exhibition.

The Wall Exhibition consisted of 19 stories taken from The Wall, each one carefully written up in the form of a letter and displayed with a prop and picture frame. Here are the 19 exhibits:

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James, 31, New Jersey, UK

“If I can’t remember the Jurassic Park theme music then our plane will crash”

Prop: inflatable dinosaur

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Jonathan, 35, Kent, UK

“I can affect fate”

Prop: clapper board

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Jessica, 23, New…

“The short-term dopamine driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.” Chamath Palihapitiya, Former Facebook Executive

Chamath’s now widely quoted statement presents a gloomy outlook for our future and dopamine has often been cited as Silicon Valley’s secret sauce so I thought it was time to find out why.

You may have noticed that dopamine has become the celebrity of brain chemicals in the media in recent years, being accused of causing a nation’s addiction to cupcakes or flaunted as a way to supercharge your sex drive (with the help of a watermelon), but what is dopamine really and why are dopamine loops triggered when we use our smartphones and connected devices?

Dopamine is one of about 20 major neurotransmitters, brain chemicals that carry urgent messages around our bodies. Without these neurotransmitters we would die.

It is at the basis of learning. It anticipates a reward when you do…

My first Facebook post about Swipe Left For Addiction has already created a conversation between people across six different countries. Parents are telling me about how their kids are able to make friends all over the world when they’re playing multi-user games. There’s no doubt that technology is enabling and there’s something special about being able to connect, and stay connected, with people from all over the world.

At the same time, I’m hearing a lot about the “indoor generation” who are living their social lives from their bedrooms thanks to this “enabling” technology. I am also reading a lot about the rise of anxiety, depression and even suicide in the post-millennial generation. An article in The Guardian was published recently about how important face-to-face relationships are to our health and well-being. Are we creating a society of super-connected but isolated, lonely people? Another Guardian article written in April cites…

On 3 March 2018 we will be getting creative at the OCDAction conference in the UK. If you are going to be at the conference you can take part in our co-creation project entitled #OCDFeelsLike.

How Can I get involved?

We will have an #OCDFeelsLike private audio recording booth set up during the day of the conference. Delegates will be able to anonymously record their experience of what OCD feels like to them in the booth.

If you’re interested in taking part come and find us at The Secret Illness desk on the main floor or head up to the booth directly and someone will be there to help you.

After the event we will edit those audio recordings into a Spoken Word piece called #OCDFeelsLike.

How will #OCDFeelsLike be used?

#OCDFeelsLike will be added to The Secret Illness Salon and shared with the community. We will also be…

In the second episode Becca explores how OCD affects relationships between mums and daughters.

Becca talks with a mum and daughter in New York who both have OCD, another mum and daughter in the UK whose daughter lives with contamination and POCD and then she compares her own experiences of growing up with a mum with OCD with the artist Leonie Hampton

The music is composed by Mitch Grussing from Minnesota. Here is a short audio piece that Mitch recorded for us about his experience of composing the music for The Secret Illness Podcast series.

On Tuesday 7 February there will be another screening of Rebel of the Keys at JW3. Following the screening there will be a Q&A with musicologist Dr Anastasia Belina-Johnson and Mark Charles, pictured here while filming scenes for the documentary in Paris. We are now pleased to announce that the Q&A will be chaired by the composer and conductor Dimitri Scarlato.

Dimitri began studying the piano at the age of 5, and aged 6, the violin. At 18, he enrolled at the Conservatorio di Musica S.Cecilia in Rome, as well as also gaining a BA in philosophy at Università La Sapienza. He then worked as pianist, musical director and composer at prestigious Italian theatres: amongst them, Teatro Regio in Parma and Teatro Argentina in Rome. After a masters degree in composition at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he composed for many short films, including the 66th Venice Film…

In this first episode of The Secret Illness podcast we take a deep dive into Steph’s story of her OCD experiences. Steph, her significant other, employer/mentor and father take us on her journey from spiral to diagnosis, to current day.

Presented and produced by Liz Smith. Music composed by Mitch Grussing.

On Monday 11 July 2o16 the feature length version of Rebel Of The Keys was screened for the first time. There was a great buzz of excitement at JW3 as many of those who had been involved in the making of the documentary came together to see it for the first time.

The location of the screening in the cinema at London’s Jewish Community felt very fitting and, because it was a sell out, JW3 have confirmed they will be screening it again later on this year.

Here are some extracts from the Q&A that followed, with musicologist Dr Anastasia Belina-Johnson and the film’s director Mark Charles on the panel:

How did you overcome the challenge that there is not a lot of archive footage of André?

MARK:  We tried to create a balance between talking heads, stock footage and re-enactments – not overdo reenactments, not overdo stock footage so we still engage with the people that…

We are delighted to announce that tickets have just gone on sale for the UK premiere of Rebel of the Keys.

The screening will be taking place on 11 July at 8.15 pm at the Jewish Community and Arts Centre, JW3, in North London in their wonderful cinema. Tickets are available now from their box office.

There is limited seating, so we do encourage you to book as soon as possible. If this screening sells out quickly, we will be able to run it again at JW3 at a future date, so if you would like to come but can’t make this date do let us know.

The film is 90 minutes in length and will be followed by a Q&A with the director Mark Charles and musicologist Dr Anastasia Belina-Johnson who features in the film. There is a lovely cafe/bar area by the cinema at JW3 so we will be there from 7…

The Secret Illness is all about exploring the realities of living with OCD through the creative arts. “This Old Ghost” was developed from a poem written by James Lloyd. James is a writer and science journalist in the UK and has suffered with OCD since childhood. As it’s such a personal poem James chose to voice it himself. The animation is by filmmaker Liz Smith.

We asked him about his poem and experiences of living with OCD.

What has your experience of OCD been?
I’ve had obsessive thoughts for as long as I remember. As a child, my head would dream up all kinds of horrible scenarios. I used to lie awake thinking that the house was going to burn down, or that an intruder was tiptoeing around the place. I remember once becoming convinced that a stranger sitting behind me in church was going to kill me. As I…

Shooting of Rebel of the Keys was completed with this final day of pick ups on Sunday.  The shoot took place at the beautiful house of Lady Camilla Panufnik, the very place where Andre Tchaikowsky spent hours talking with his friend Andrzej Panufnik.  Andrew read from Andre’s diaries and Nico de Villiers played Andre’s music on Panufnik’s grand piano.  A truly enchanting day and a fitting place to end the filming of the documentary.

A big thank you to Camilla for letting us film at her home (for the third time!), and to Eve for bringing over Andre’s diaries and sharing them with us.

In the making of this documentary we met some extraordinary and fascinating characters, but one of the most precious moments was when we finally met Halinka Janowska, Andre’s closest friend for many years.  Their relationship was tumultuous at times and much has been captured in their letters to one another.  Sitting in her small flat in Warsaw, hearing her recount her memories of Andre, full of emotion and warmth, was a great privilege.