Comedian and actor Eddie Murphy has recently begun opening up about his life and his experience with his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder diagnosis.
Keep reading to know more.
64-year-old actor and comedian Eddie Murphy opened up about his life, his experiences, and how, in retrospect, certain things started to make a lot of sense. He revealed in his new documentary titled Being Eddie that he first realized he had OCD when he was only a child.
OCD is a health condition that is widely misunderstood. The condition causes people to carry out compulsions; an act which might be repeated several times, or perhaps have unpleasant and unwanted thoughts, which can cause them a lot of distress.
The compulsive behavior they have can usually be a way for them to relieve the stress they might be under due to the intrusive thoughts they are experiencing.
In his new documentary, the actor shared that he had one habit that he later realized was a symptom of OCD.
“I used to have that OCD when I was a kid. I didn’t know what it was. I would go and check the stove in the kitchen and make sure all the gas was off in the kitchen,” he shared.
“And I’d lay down for about, you know, five minutes, and I would get back up and go back in the kitchen and look at the stove again and check all the gas, and then I’d go back in the bed and lay there for about five, 10 minutes and then get back up and go look at it and look at the stove and make sure all the gas was off,” he said.
“Then go back to bed, lay there for another 10 minutes and get back – and this went on for maybe like an hour. And I did that every night,” the actor divulged.
He shared that at the time no one thought this symptom could be a part of something bigger.
“Every night. And I’d just say, ‘That’s just some weird s**t that I do.’ “My mother, nobody knew this was going on,” Eddie Murphy recalled.
It was when he came upon a news item on TV that spoke about OCD that he pieced things together.
He recalled, “It was like, ‘Oh, that’s what I – I be doing s**t like that’. I said, ‘Oh’. I was like, ‘Oh, mental illness?’… And when I saw that it was like some mental illness s**t, I made myself stop doing it.”
“I was like, ‘I’m not – I’m not doing it no more. I thought I was weird. I ain’t know I had some mental illness. F**k that. I ain’t have no mental illness. Mental illness, my ass’. And I forced myself to stop doing it,” the comedian shared.
As always, Eddie Murphy used humor to talk about his life situations and diffuse the tension about a serious topic. What do you think of his admission? Let us know in the comments section on Facebook.
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