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PURE OCD: The Invisible Side of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Pure The Invisible Side of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder follows Chrissie Hodges, a typical eight year old whose life changed drastically with the onset of symptoms from Pure OCD. Overwhelmed with confusion about her obsessions, Chrissie developed a delusion that God was punishing her with bad thoughts and behaviors because she had done something sinful. Outwardly, Chrissie was an image of perfection. She was smart, popular, athletic, and devoutly religious. On the inside, she was riddled with fear of offending God, terrified of the tortuous fear of vomiting and sexual obsessions, and consumed with mental rituals she kept hidden from the world. The shame of believing she let God down and the terrifying content of her obsessions kept her from telling anyone what she was experiencing for 12 years. At age 20, unable to maintain the façade of a normal life under the weight of a deep depression, Chrissie attempted suicide. Barely escaping death, Chrissie found the strength and hope to choose life over death. Her journey surviving a self-inflicted wound, treatment in a psychiatric hospital, and working toward recovery with Pure OCD was almost as difficult as the 12 years combined in the silence of the disorder.
205 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 2, 2017
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430 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
April 13, 2021
This book's title makes it sound like a monograph about OCD, but this is a memoir from the perspective of a woman who suffered from OCD symptoms from the age of eight, kept silent about her disorder for years, and was afraid to tell anyone about her intrusive thoughts and anxieties. Ultimately, she was able to get help, and she is now an advocate devoted to reducing the stigmas surrounding mental illnesses and OCD in particular.
The memoir is honest and heartfelt, and Hodges's writing gives the reader a sense of immediacy. This is especially important to help readers connect with the panic that she felt as a child. She is able to write from the perspective that she had then, and makes it all seem current, instead of filtering everything through her age, maturity level, and psychiatric knowledge at the time of writing. However, this book would have benefited greatly from more revision and editing. Parts of it are repetitive for the purpose of representing OCD thought spirals, but the author also repeats herself at other times simply through lack of writing polish. There are also occasional typos, and some sentence structure issues.
I was willing to overlook all of this, since the rawness and immediacy are part of the story. This is someone's personal experience with OCD, not a novel or a medical study, and I didn't expect it to be perfect. However, I do have significant critiques of how Hodges presented her story. She devotes lots of detail to fairly peripheral elements of her life, such as mentioning every guy she dated and the various feelings she had for them, while she does not introduce or explain some things that are vital to understanding her life and experiences.
For example, when she wrote about her cousin's devastating death, I felt horrible for her, and I could feel through her writing the pain and misery that she felt. However, this section of the book would have had far more impact if she had mentioned her cousin previously. She writes about how much she loved him, and about how her times hanging out with him were some of the only times she ever felt normal, but she had never mentioned anything about this before. If she had brought him up as a character while writing about earlier experiences, and shown the reader what a difference he made in her life, this loss would have had far greater impact in the reading experience.
She also never explains her immediate family situation. I can understand her desire to respect other people's privacy, if that was her motivating factor here, but she was very vague. During the parts about her childhood, she mainly only mentions her mother, and when she writes about her suicide attempt in college, the reader learns that she has a Methodist pastor father and a stepmother. She may feel that her family background was irrelevant to the story of her OCD, but I would have appreciated clarity on basic biographical details and context for her experiences.
This is especially significant because her OCD experience was entwined with profoundly distorted understandings of God, and the reader never gets a real sense of how her family or church background spoke of or represented God. Throughout the book, she emphasizes her certainty that God had afflicted her with terrible thoughts and feelings, and that he was punishing her for being bad. She intended for her mental compulsions to counteract this, and tried to be good enough to avoid judgement. This is a fairly common issue for OCD patients who struggle with scrupulosity, but her beliefs about God were completely disconnected from the Bible, and she never mentioned Jesus.
This is significant to me because I anticipated that I would connect with her experiences based on the premise, but I ended up not relating to the religious aspect at all. She was convinced that God was punishing her with bad thoughts, and wondered why God did this to her, when people who seemed to have worse lives weren't suffering the same way. I could relate to this from my past, but her concept of God was extremely twisted, with no message of salvation, hope, forgiveness, or mercy. I expected that in this book, she would wrestle through who God is, what she believes, and how it connects with her experience, but God was a vague higher power to her, and even though she mentions reading the Bible, attending Christian camps, etc., she clearly lacked any meaningful sense of the gospel message.
This makes me wonder about her family background, and about her church experiences. Did they teach the gospel of salvation through Jesus and not your own works, and she completely missed it, or was church mainly just a social event that emphasized being a good person? Did anyone ever tell her that you can't please God through your own holiness, and that we come to Him in faith through Jesus, knowing that all our sin is covered by his sacrifice? The most basic elements of Christian teaching would contradict her thoughts and beliefs, and even though I can totally understand why her OCD would drive her to think irrational things, she never mentions enough about her faith experience for me to know if her parents and church utterly failed her here, or if it was just a symptom of her disorder.
Ultimately, she came to a point of realizing that God wasn't punishing her, and that God wasn't causing her bad thoughts. She was able to get an OCD diagnosis and gradually heal, and gives the reader insight into this process. However, she never brings up God again, or addresses how her view of God and Christianity changed. Maybe she left her faith behind entirely, and didn't want to scare Christians off from treatment by saying that. Maybe she ended up discovering that she had completely misunderstood her faith, and was able to learn more about God. I can't know. I understand that this is private information, and that she may have good reasons not to share it, but because this OCD story hinges on a profoundly skewed view of the divine, it was very unsatisfying to me that she didn't provide follow-up on how her view of God changed once she knew she had OCD.
This is a really long, rambling review, and I don't really expect anyone to read the whole thing, but I wanted to express myself as part of my own experience of processing this reading experience. I enjoyed the memoir, and I'm glad that I read it, because Hodges provides great insight into her personal experiences with OCD and the impact that this had on her. People with OCD can feel seen and understood here, and people who don't understand the disorder, or who can't begin to imagine what it is like, can learn a lot from the vivid, immediate, well-presented details of the author's lived experience.
However, because of my critiques, I wouldn't rate this more than three stars. I would also recommend Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought as a more professional, better-written, better-structured memoir about intrusive thoughts and OCD. These books have many similarities, but Pure OCD is not nearly as well-written, and includes confusing and poorly explained elements about faith, whereas the other is secular and focuses on scrupulosity without bringing in issues related to God that are never fully explored or resolved in the text.
The memoir is honest and heartfelt, and Hodges's writing gives the reader a sense of immediacy. This is especially important to help readers connect with the panic that she felt as a child. She is able to write from the perspective that she had then, and makes it all seem current, instead of filtering everything through her age, maturity level, and psychiatric knowledge at the time of writing. However, this book would have benefited greatly from more revision and editing. Parts of it are repetitive for the purpose of representing OCD thought spirals, but the author also repeats herself at other times simply through lack of writing polish. There are also occasional typos, and some sentence structure issues.
I was willing to overlook all of this, since the rawness and immediacy are part of the story. This is someone's personal experience with OCD, not a novel or a medical study, and I didn't expect it to be perfect. However, I do have significant critiques of how Hodges presented her story. She devotes lots of detail to fairly peripheral elements of her life, such as mentioning every guy she dated and the various feelings she had for them, while she does not introduce or explain some things that are vital to understanding her life and experiences.
For example, when she wrote about her cousin's devastating death, I felt horrible for her, and I could feel through her writing the pain and misery that she felt. However, this section of the book would have had far more impact if she had mentioned her cousin previously. She writes about how much she loved him, and about how her times hanging out with him were some of the only times she ever felt normal, but she had never mentioned anything about this before. If she had brought him up as a character while writing about earlier experiences, and shown the reader what a difference he made in her life, this loss would have had far greater impact in the reading experience.
She also never explains her immediate family situation. I can understand her desire to respect other people's privacy, if that was her motivating factor here, but she was very vague. During the parts about her childhood, she mainly only mentions her mother, and when she writes about her suicide attempt in college, the reader learns that she has a Methodist pastor father and a stepmother. She may feel that her family background was irrelevant to the story of her OCD, but I would have appreciated clarity on basic biographical details and context for her experiences.
This is especially significant because her OCD experience was entwined with profoundly distorted understandings of God, and the reader never gets a real sense of how her family or church background spoke of or represented God. Throughout the book, she emphasizes her certainty that God had afflicted her with terrible thoughts and feelings, and that he was punishing her for being bad. She intended for her mental compulsions to counteract this, and tried to be good enough to avoid judgement. This is a fairly common issue for OCD patients who struggle with scrupulosity, but her beliefs about God were completely disconnected from the Bible, and she never mentioned Jesus.
This is significant to me because I anticipated that I would connect with her experiences based on the premise, but I ended up not relating to the religious aspect at all. She was convinced that God was punishing her with bad thoughts, and wondered why God did this to her, when people who seemed to have worse lives weren't suffering the same way. I could relate to this from my past, but her concept of God was extremely twisted, with no message of salvation, hope, forgiveness, or mercy. I expected that in this book, she would wrestle through who God is, what she believes, and how it connects with her experience, but God was a vague higher power to her, and even though she mentions reading the Bible, attending Christian camps, etc., she clearly lacked any meaningful sense of the gospel message.
This makes me wonder about her family background, and about her church experiences. Did they teach the gospel of salvation through Jesus and not your own works, and she completely missed it, or was church mainly just a social event that emphasized being a good person? Did anyone ever tell her that you can't please God through your own holiness, and that we come to Him in faith through Jesus, knowing that all our sin is covered by his sacrifice? The most basic elements of Christian teaching would contradict her thoughts and beliefs, and even though I can totally understand why her OCD would drive her to think irrational things, she never mentions enough about her faith experience for me to know if her parents and church utterly failed her here, or if it was just a symptom of her disorder.
Ultimately, she came to a point of realizing that God wasn't punishing her, and that God wasn't causing her bad thoughts. She was able to get an OCD diagnosis and gradually heal, and gives the reader insight into this process. However, she never brings up God again, or addresses how her view of God and Christianity changed. Maybe she left her faith behind entirely, and didn't want to scare Christians off from treatment by saying that. Maybe she ended up discovering that she had completely misunderstood her faith, and was able to learn more about God. I can't know. I understand that this is private information, and that she may have good reasons not to share it, but because this OCD story hinges on a profoundly skewed view of the divine, it was very unsatisfying to me that she didn't provide follow-up on how her view of God changed once she knew she had OCD.
This is a really long, rambling review, and I don't really expect anyone to read the whole thing, but I wanted to express myself as part of my own experience of processing this reading experience. I enjoyed the memoir, and I'm glad that I read it, because Hodges provides great insight into her personal experiences with OCD and the impact that this had on her. People with OCD can feel seen and understood here, and people who don't understand the disorder, or who can't begin to imagine what it is like, can learn a lot from the vivid, immediate, well-presented details of the author's lived experience.
However, because of my critiques, I wouldn't rate this more than three stars. I would also recommend Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought as a more professional, better-written, better-structured memoir about intrusive thoughts and OCD. These books have many similarities, but Pure OCD is not nearly as well-written, and includes confusing and poorly explained elements about faith, whereas the other is secular and focuses on scrupulosity without bringing in issues related to God that are never fully explored or resolved in the text.
September 17, 2017
I really think every human should read a memoir like this about any and every mental illness. It takes so much strength to open up to strangers about innermost thoughts and feelings that are not considered "normal." Learning about these topics can help increase our empathy towards others and make us better humans.
My one issue with this book, and the reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5, is the writing. A book like this is so impactful. But when the writing isn't succinct and thoughtfully edited to make sure the best points are made in the best way, it takes away from the message. I found many grammar errors and incorrect sentence structures. And often, I was forced out of my intense focus on the story because I had to reread sentences that weren't making sense. I also found there was a lot of repetition where it wasn't needed. Some topics the author writes about absolutely need to be repeated to help the reader understand how constant and consistent those thoughts and obsessions and compulsions were/are. But other times the repetition simply felt like an afterthought or an oversight. I believe this book would have an even bigger punch if it was more succinctly written and had better sentence structure.
But with that said, this is an incredible memoir by an incredibly brave person. And I thank her, sincerely, for writing this book and helping others understand what a life with Pure O looks like.
My one issue with this book, and the reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5, is the writing. A book like this is so impactful. But when the writing isn't succinct and thoughtfully edited to make sure the best points are made in the best way, it takes away from the message. I found many grammar errors and incorrect sentence structures. And often, I was forced out of my intense focus on the story because I had to reread sentences that weren't making sense. I also found there was a lot of repetition where it wasn't needed. Some topics the author writes about absolutely need to be repeated to help the reader understand how constant and consistent those thoughts and obsessions and compulsions were/are. But other times the repetition simply felt like an afterthought or an oversight. I believe this book would have an even bigger punch if it was more succinctly written and had better sentence structure.
But with that said, this is an incredible memoir by an incredibly brave person. And I thank her, sincerely, for writing this book and helping others understand what a life with Pure O looks like.
August 26, 2023
Dr. Phillipson helps Chrissie defeat OCD (she actually has 'Pure O', consisting of ruminating, avoidance, religious prayers and rituals all happening in the mind). An intriguing memorial giving insight into OCD and spreading awareness about Pure O).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 15, 2018
Was completely entranced by your story!
I've been suffering with OCD for about a year and a half now. This was the first story I read about the disorder. You made me feel like I'm not alone in this fight. Your book gave me hope in believing I can actually get through this and I don't have to end it afterall. Your story was inspiring and I would recommend it to everyone, to people like us, and even to people who want to understand what it truly feels to live with this disorder. Thank you for sharing your story.
I've been suffering with OCD for about a year and a half now. This was the first story I read about the disorder. You made me feel like I'm not alone in this fight. Your book gave me hope in believing I can actually get through this and I don't have to end it afterall. Your story was inspiring and I would recommend it to everyone, to people like us, and even to people who want to understand what it truly feels to live with this disorder. Thank you for sharing your story.
June 9, 2023
So glad I read this
As a fellow OCD, Specifically Pure O, sufferer I was so happy to find this book and read it. It gave me great insight into my own struggles and let me know I'm not alone
As a fellow OCD, Specifically Pure O, sufferer I was so happy to find this book and read it. It gave me great insight into my own struggles and let me know I'm not alone
January 15, 2021
To anyone that thinks OCD is just a “hand washing disorder,” read this. A beautiful memoir that encapsulates the relentless uphill battle of OCD, while shedding light on treatment and acceptance.
February 1, 2020
Chrissie vividly describes 12 years of living with OCD, without the knowledge that a mental illness was the source of her agony, and wraps up the book with a bit of insight into treatment and hope for learning to manage OCD. The mental distress portrayed in this book is so palpable I would not recommend it as a bedtime story, but it's a wonderful glimpse into the style of thoughts OCD can bring, so I would recommend it to those hoping to learn more about the experience of living with a mental illness.
Read
March 26, 2025Christie is an amazing advocate for the OCD community. When I was diagnosed with OCD 8 years ago her YouTube videos about her experience with OCD brought me so much comfort and hope. This memoir is a heartbreaking reminder that OCD is a debilitating disorder. Her vulnerability is such a gift to the OCD community and I’m so glad she exists so that others can feel less alone.
I do wish the memoir was a little more reflective rather than the simple first person style it was written in. It felt more like a long essay than a put together book.
I do wish the memoir was a little more reflective rather than the simple first person style it was written in. It felt more like a long essay than a put together book.
March 17, 2017
Powerful description of living with mental illnrss
This book tells the story of a woman's experience with OCD, starting in 3rd grade through a suicide attempt in college, to making progress with treatment. Her description of her disruptive thought processes makes you understand how difficult it is to live with this disorder, and why it is so difficult to get help. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about mental illness.
This book tells the story of a woman's experience with OCD, starting in 3rd grade through a suicide attempt in college, to making progress with treatment. Her description of her disruptive thought processes makes you understand how difficult it is to live with this disorder, and why it is so difficult to get help. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about mental illness.
February 1, 2023
As someone who lives with OCD this memoir by Chrissie was so touching. She was so raw with her thoughts and what she experienced. This book is so helpful for those who are thinking about starting ERP and those going through it. It’s gives those who don’t know what OCD a different outlook on it, viewing it as what else OCD can look like other than contamination or “compulsive hand washing.” I wish I would have read this book when I first started ERP
June 27, 2020
I’m so thankful I found Chrissie and for the work and advocacy she does for OCD and specifically Pure O. This was a raw, heartbreaking, and uplifting account. I did have to skim through some rather heavy parts and overall, my reaction to this was very emotional and I did get triggered quite a bit. However, it was necessary to be exposed to these words and feelings and knowing I’m not alone.
February 25, 2022
The content of this book was powerful and moving. I have so much respect for Chrissie Hodges and her work for OCD advocacy. That being said, the formatting and writing style were difficult to follow at times. I’d recommend this book anyways just to get better insight into the life of a person with OCD.
December 24, 2025
This book is the first physical book I've finished in an incredibly long time. I usually have trouble reading so I listen to audiobooks but with this, I felt determined to understand Chrissie, OCD and myself. At the end I felt so incredibly proud for her and her journey. Helping people is what it's all about.
(side note: also my first review on here I think)
(side note: also my first review on here I think)
December 26, 2024
My mother has severe OCD. This book helps me understand the inner working of her mind a lot better.
December 31, 2024
It's a great book to understand how the mind of an OCD sufferer works and what Pure-O is, to instill hope and raise awareness about the condition.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews