I still remember, when in February 2007 after a group of children were suspended from school for throwing snowballs, an angry mother writing to me to ask: "What will they think of next?" Regrettably, the obsessive impulse to regulate children's life ensures that the next target of child protection is already on the horizon.
But in some ways the journals help us understand Gray's obsessive confessional impulse and his haphazard snatching at spiritual consolation.
His quietly furious paragraphs become choked with multiple examples, and for all his hostility to the internship culture, the obsessive, workaholic American impulses that often drive it – when I was a student at Berkeley in the 90s, I remember peers routinely sending out 50 internship applications – seem at work here too.
Fortunately, the author has journalistic and novelistic impulses as well as obsessive ones.
For one thing, according to Ms. Butler, the district attorney's office and the parole board now accept that Mr. McCollum has Asperger syndrome, with the obsessive fascination and inability to control impulses that are often symptoms of the condition.
Having many intrusive, unwanted thoughts or impulses is a known element of obsessive compulsive order.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by the presence of repetitive, highly intrusive, anxiety-provoking thoughts, impulses, or images known as obsessions.
Psychiatrists classify it as an impulse control problem, alongside things like obsessive compulsive disorder.
The impulse cannot be easily aligned with an obsessive psyche; for athletes, neither can it be boiled down to a reliance on endorphins or an addiction to pain.
The tics occupy the same place in me as other obsessive practices in my life, like writing, a daily impulse I haven't been able to shake off for longer than the oldest of my noises.
