Obsessive-compulsive disorders are characterised by obsessive thoughts that cannot be mastered and by the repetitive performance of ritual actions that cannot be avoided. This severely handicapping condition affects about one million adults and an unknown number of children in France alone. Patients suffering from the disorders have frequently received poor or inadequate treatment. This is due to the absence of information about this little-known condition, as well as to the insufficient training given to doctors and psychologists. Yet the World Health Organisation, acting in conjunction with the main international scientific psychiatric associations, has clearly defined the disorders as well as their recommended treatment.

The aim of this book is to widely disseminate the specialised information that will spectacularly improve the condition of over half of all sufferers from the disorders and to break apart the secrecy that surrounds the condition, and by giving sufferers concrete, specialised and easily comprehensible information to offer them the tools with which to take arms against their disease and actively combat it. The goal is to enable readers to help themselves, and so to become specialists of a condition that they are used to enduring as passive victims.

Alain Sauteraud is a medical psychiatrist specialising in obsessive-compulsive disorders. He practises and teaches in Bordeaux.