When obsession shakes certainties and challenges beliefs

What happens when questions of belief are subject to obsessive behaviours? The impact of OCD on key life moments.

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

A close-up of a complex clock mechanism featuring small statues within it.

The Millennium clock tower.

National Museum of Scotland.

I’m eleven years old and I’ve been given a New Testament in our school assembly. This is the first time I’ve owned a copy of the Bible. So far, I’ve only heard it read to me in school or the few times I’ve gone to church with my family. I flick through it that evening, taken by the table at the front that directs you to different verses that speak to how you might be feeling. I find myself reading Revelation. The imagery frightens me. The tone, the threat, the fear, and the condemnation… would this be me if I didn’t believe in the right way? If I didn’t believe enough? I’m terrified of this book, these words, terrified of God, even. Mostly, I’m terrified by my own doubt and uncertainty about all things religious, despite wanting to believe. What if God isn’t real? What if God is and I just don’t believe enough? God will know I’m not sure. I tell myself not to think about it. If I’m to avoid thinking about it, I can never read the Bible again. I accept this as a rule.

I’m twelve years old and I’m standing in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, listening to one of Bach’s minor key concertos playing from the Millennium Clock. To me, it looks like it depicts some sort of hellscape straight from the book of Revelation. Death, suffering, and evil are everywhere in this model with its eerie red glow at the bottom. It brings up all the thoughts I’ve been trying to avoid – “you don’t believe enough” and “this is what hell looks like.” I tell myself to forget about it. If I’m to forget about it, I need to make sure that I never talk about it and don’t tell anyone how afraid of it I am. Talking about it makes it real, I think. I accept this, too, as a rule.

I’m thirteen years old and I’m sitting in a church trying to concentrate on the service. I can’t because I keep having the thought that I don’t believe enough. I’m worrying about what the reading might be – I’m still too scared to read the Bible and I can’t prevent myself from hearing it in this space. I’m afraid of thinking that I don’t believe enough, and that God will know because this is God’s church after all. I tell myself that I do not belong in this place if I cannot control my thoughts. If I can’t do that, I can never go to church again. This too, becomes a rule.

I’m fourteen years old and I’ve started praying every evening. I’m not sure what prompted this, but I also know that I must do it correctly. If I pray and forget to conclude with “amen”, then it seems obvious that God will continue to listen to my thoughts as if I’ve forgotten to hang up the phone. I try to keep my thoughts corralled and pure when I pray. If I don’t end my prayer, God will hear all my worst thoughts – the ones I am ashamed of, the ones that scare me, the ones that fill me with doubt. I tell myself that I can no longer run that risk. If I’m to prevent this, I shouldn’t pray. Another rule.

I was scared to say these things aloud – to voice my fears or doubts in case they somehow became worse if I acknowledged them.

I’m now in my late twenties, and I have been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and I’m slowly unlearning the rules I’ve created for myself over the years. Each of them, in their own way, was designed to keep me safe from harm, safe from thinking about something that frightened me, or acknowledging difficult emotions like doubt and uncertainty.

It has been a long road to reach that diagnosis. OCD is regularly misunderstood and presented as punchline of jokes – “I’m so OCD!” is one that I’ve heard far too many times when someone simply means that they’re organised. The problem with these jokes is that it disguises the reality and makes it that bit harder for people to recognise what it is they’re really dealing with. OCD-UK, a charity to whom I owe a great deal, describe OCD as follows: “Obsessions are very distressing and result in a person carrying out repetitive behaviours or rituals in order to prevent a perceived harm and/or worry that preceding obsessions have focused their attention on.”

Obsessions could cover virtually any topic, and everyone will experience compulsions in slightly different ways. I didn’t recognise that I was living with OCD because almost all of my compulsions were mental rituals or avoidance behaviour. I would try and avoid thinking about things, check whether thoughts upset me, avoid reading the Bible… Layers and layers of compulsive behaviour in response to frightening intrusive thoughts that became associated with faith. I was scared to say these things aloud – to voice my fears or doubts in case they somehow became worse if I acknowledged them. I now know to call this “magical thinking” but I still find it difficult at times to accept that I cannot cause something to happen simply by saying it.

It can be particularly difficult for people with OCD to cope with uncertainty. I can see why anxiety and doubt about the existence of God has been hard for me to tolerate. I also know that I can never achieve absolute certainty and part of learning to live with OCD is learning to accept that and make choices despite it. Last year I attended the International OCD Foundation (IOCDF) Faith and OCD conference and was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people there. So many people with the same worries and doubts as me, and many more who had found that OCD impacted them in different ways.

But it was hard for a doctor to diagnose me until I could find the words to articulate what I was experiencing. It wasn’t until I started reading books about other people’s experiences with OCD that I started to recognise my own thought patterns, my own fears and doubts in other people’s words. Author and video creator John Green shares a very powerful video titled “What OCD is like (for me)” where he shares what his experience of having OCD and says:

“I can say what it is like more than what it is.”

This gives me a little more courage to tell people what living with OCD can be like and represent some of the diverse experiences of the condition. For someone who was too frightened to open a Bible, I think it’s a little ironic that I am now a theologian. My doctoral research project is focusing on faith and OCD, and in particular, how it might affect someone’s relationship with God. I hope to make use of some of my own experience along the way – examining my fear of not being sure enough, my worries that my intrusive thoughts would somehow offend God… I hope that by sharing this, I can raise a little more awareness of an experience that so many of us try to keep secret or just aren’t ready to speak about.

Through advocacy and research, I’d like to share a little of, as John Green says, what OCD looks like (for me). I’d like to add my voice – now that I’ve found it – to the discussion in the hopes that someone might read this and recognise what they’re going through. And if that’s you? You’re not alone. There is help and there is hope.

Review

Ageing

Culture

Film & TV

5 September 2025

5 min read

Foundation shows you can’t ‘Ctrl+V’ a soul

A sci-fi classic unearths transhumanism’s flaws

Giles Gough

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

A woman confronts a man whose clone stands behind her.

Apple TV.

One of the reasons that science fiction has had enduring popularity as a genre is its ability to illustrate thought experiments. The way it can attempt to answer questions that can’t even be asked in any other kind of fiction is what gives it power as a form of storytelling. One question that keeps coming up is: what if you could live forever, through technology?

One person to attempt to answer this question is Isaac Asimov, one of the early giants of the sci-fi genre. Born in 1920, Asimov arrived into a world that was rapidly changing, and yet, his imagination was still able to outpace it. Much of what he is known for is his depiction of robots, with ‘Asimov’s laws of robotics’ influencing the depiction of androids in Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, direct adaptations of Asimov’s own work were few and far between. Robin Williams’ Bicentennial Man released in 1999 and Will Smith starred in I, Robot in 2004 were the best of the bunch. That is, until Apple TV began adapting Asimov’s Foundation.

Asimov’s Foundation books were written across the span of fifty years. The premise of the stories is that in a distant future, a galactic empire is beginning to fail and cannot be saved. The mathematician Hari Seldon develops the theory of psychohistory, where he uses statistical laws to predict the future of large populations. In the wake of the empire’s fall, Seldon predicts a dark age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Seldon devises a plan to reduce this dark age to just one thousand years by preserving a ‘foundation’ of knowledge. The novels describe some of the dramatic events that frustrate, or are a result of Seldon's Plan. One of the features of the story that the Apple TV show of Foundation focuses on is attempted immortality.

Foundation gives us three depictions of ‘immortality’. Firstly, Seldon orchestrates having his conscience eventually uploaded into the Prime Radiant, a super-computer in order to allow him to shepherd his plans beyond the limits of his own human lifespan. Secondly, his protégé, Gaal Dornick is throughout the first season put into a cryo-sleep that lets her move into the future without ageing. Finally, the characters of Dawn, Day and Dusk attempt immortality through cloning. The tyrannical emperor Cleon decided that the only person fit to succeed him was…himself. So, he creates a revolving triumvirate of his own clones: Brother Day, a Cleon in his prime; Brother Dusk, an aging Cleon who serves to advise Day; and Brother Dawn, a young Cleon being trained to succeed Brother Day. This "genetic dynasty" has been ruling with an iron fist for 400 years by the start of the series.

These interpretations of immortality grant each character the ability to shape and curate history in a way that no one human could ever achieve. But as there’s no drama without conflict, Foundation shows us the downsides of this kind of immortality. Firstly, Gaal’s version, being frozen in cryo-sleep for decades might literally extend her life, but from Gaal’s perspective, it is no longer than it would have been otherwise. Whilst she does get to see history play out, she loses connections with people like her family and her lover Raych. She is unable to build the life she would have planned for herself.

No-one mourns your absence because there’s an identical copy of you still walking about.

Seldon’s version of immortality is flirted with by tech bros and transhumanists like Peter Thiel. The idea of a computer that has the processing power to replicate a human brain turns up in numerous stories, but it’s another false immortality. Firstly, the original Hari Seldon still dies, and the ‘digital version’ stored eventually in the Prime Radiant is merely a copy. We might not think much of copy and pasting a document or file on our computer, but it doesn’t quite work the same for human beings. A copy is not the same as the original. You can’t ‘Ctrl+V’ a soul. In addition to this, we find out at one point that due to a mistake, Hari’s digital self has been trapped in darkness, fully conscious but with no rest, no distractions and no way of communicating with the outside world for 148 years. This naturally drags Hari into an interminable madness.

Lastly, the Empire run by the clones, Dawn, Day and Dusk suffer much the same problem as the other two. It’s not a real immortality; as each clone eventually dies. But in many ways, it’s even worse than death. No-one mourns your absence because there’s an identical copy of you still walking about. This is a trope that is troubling, because a protagonist dying and being returned via cloning is often presented as a ‘resurrection’. It has been used as a story arc in the X-men comics and in Peter Capaldi’s era of Doctor Who, with very little outcry from their respective fandoms. Possibly because the thought that the producers have canonically killed the main character and replaced them with an exact copy is simply too uncomfortable to consider. In Foundation itself, the clones are judged by their fidelity to the original (a cold and petty despot) and any deviation is met with a death sentence. Whilst clones may be one way to rule a sci-fi galactic empire, it’s possibly their inability to adapt to changing circumstances that contributes to the fall of civilisation.

The great irony in all of these interpretations is; you are only immortal to those observing you, and an immortality that relies on perspective is not really an immortality at all.

It seems that hard science fiction, and ancient Greek myths can at times, overlap in their focus. Viewed in one light, Asimov’s Foundation series can be seen as one long story of Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods to give it as a gift to mankind, only to be punished by Zeus for his actions. Asimov appears to be telling us that mankind can’t accurately predict the future and you can’t live forever. So despite being a staunch atheist, one of the great minds of science fiction might be suggesting that immortality may belong squarely in the realm of the divine.

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