Healing from obsessive-compulsive disorder

2021-09-16

AMSTERDAM - From the age of twelve until the age of twenty-two, Erwin Roebroeks was in the grip of a compulsive disorder. He showered eight hours a day, drank soapsuds while wearing surgical gowns, and cut open his skin to be able to clean the inside. At first, the medical world wrote him off. Roebroeks will never get rid of his severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (ocd).

And yet, after a long process and three years of in-patient treatment with the most extreme therapies, he manages to do what hardly anyone ever does. He is freed from his compulsion. He leaves the clinic as reborn, but outside he is confronted with the years he has missed. What does the wide world mean for someone who has seen the darkest parts of himself in an isolated clinic? What do friendship and love mean to a man who has known great loneliness? In Ik dwang, Roebroeks investigates how it is possible that he has been cured, and what it means to be liberated from an evil that had a hold on him for so long.

Team members

Erwin Roebroeks

Erwin Roebroeks is a Dutch writer, researcher and curator in the field of music and opera.

Supported

€ 4.500 allocated on 4/07/2017.

FPD/2017/1377

Grant

Pascal Decroos Fund

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