She writes that OCD "is a psychological illness that has, on more than one occasion, brought me literally to my knees. With its threatening, fearful thoughts and laborious rituals, it has been the bane of my life."

Since the age of seven, Poulton says she has "been dominated by the voices in my head that told me if I don't obey them, my loved ones will come to terrible harm. It is time-consuming, anxiety inducing, and miserable to live with."

In 2007, she reached "a crisis point," when the obsessions "became almost intolerable." At that point, she vowed to help herself "through sheer willpower." Poulton's diary entries reveal the process by which she began to ignore "internal commands" to perform OCD rituals by writing things down and replacing "the warped logic in" her "mind with a lucid, logical written fact."