Will Poulter reveals the ‘cruelty’ of OCD and details the intrusive thoughts he was having for ‘as long as he can remember’

Will Poulter has spoken out on his battle with OCD and detailed the intrusive thoughts he has had for ‘as long as he can remember’.

The Bear star, 32, lifted the lid on his mental health struggles in a candid conversation with Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place podcast.

Asked about his battle against OCD, the actor said he was diagnosed with it in his early teens but had suffered from intrusive thoughts long before then.

‘From as early as I can remember [something was not great mentally],’ he explained.

‘OCD is something I was diagnosed with in my early teens, and when I reflect on it, I think I had intrusive thoughts, which is one of the subsets of OCD if you like, and undiagnosed OCD when I was aware of my imaginary best friend, for example.

‘It just had a different and typically imaginative spin on it for a child. I can remember having this voice in my head telling me if I didn’t walk on certain paving stones on the way up to my mum and dad’s house, something terrible was going to happen to them.

Will Poulter has revealed the ‘cruelty’ of OCD and detailed the intrusive thoughts he has had for ‘as long as he can remember’

The star, 32, (pictured, in We Are The Millers in 2013) lifted the lid on his mental health struggles in a candid conversation with the Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place podcast

‘It’s so interesting. When I was younger that was just this voice in my head, this figure that I labelled as this negative character in my life, and only post my diagnosis – and actually well after knowing that I had OCD – did I look back on that and go, “oh that’s what that was”.’

Will also described feeling ‘alone’ in his fight against the disorder and it was only when he received therapy that this subsided slightly. 

He added: ‘I was really lucky. I got access to therapy in my early teens. I was probably 14 when I first started experiencing obsessive compulsive thoughts and the ruminations and intrusive thoughts.

‘Until it was diagnosed and until I received that therapy, I just thought I was totally alone with this condition, or not even condition at that time, this way of thinking, with this defunct brain. I was so scared.

‘And that I think is the scariest thing about any mental health issues and you can never underestimate how alone someone can feel in their state. 

‘Even when you’re telling someone, “I have anxiety too, I have intrusive thoughts, I have OCD”, I know because I’ve been there myself that 90 per cent of the time that the other person is thinking, “you do but not like me though”.’

The We Are The Millers star also shed light on the ‘cruelty’ of OCD and recalled one conversation involving Jordan Stephens and Harley Sylvester of the Rizzle Kicks which changed his perspective on it.

‘The distinction between fact and feeling is massive and one of the cruellest aspects of OCD is that it totally distorts that,’ he said.

Asked by Fearne about his battle against OCD, the actor said he was diagnosed with it in his early teens

Will also described feeling ‘alone’ in his fight against the disorder and it was only when he received therapy that this subsided slightly 

‘And I think through repetition and constant rumination it blurs that distinction between fact and feeling so much where you start to confuse your feelings for fact and vice versa.

‘Jordan and Harley of Rizzle Kicks, I heard them talking about their mental health and something really interesting that Jordan said about Harley but the two of them spoke about it in tandem: the fascinating thing about OCD, and potentially one of its cruellest things, is that often those intrusive thoughts and the worst thing you can imagine, is the worst thing you can imagine.

‘And your OCD has created it precisely because it’s the antithesis of how you actually feel and it takes what you value most or the version of yourself that you most want to be, your idealistic self, and it creates a subverted version of that whereby it convinces you the opposite is going to happen or you’re going to become the opposite of who you want to be, or you’re going to behave in a way that’s the most abhorrent way of behaving, or the most terrible thing you can think of happening is going to happen.

‘OCD is so cruel that it’ll do that to you.’