Bedlam.

This four part series boldly challenges the myths and taboos about mental illness through unprecedented access to the patients and staff of the South London and Maudsley (SLaM) - the world’s oldest psychiatric institution. The first programme tackles anxiety. We meet Aaron, a manager with an oil company who has OCD. He can spend hours opening and closing drawers or performing other minor tasks, unable to stop until he's carried it out a certain number of times. He’s one of 16 patients on an intensive therapy programme at the Bethlem Royal Hospital’s Anxiety Disorders Residential Unit (ADRU), which treats the top 1% of sufferers in the country. Helen is a librarian at the British Museum. She has an irrational fear of harming strangers, believing that she’s somehow responsible for killing them in road traffic accidents or putting them in rubbish bins. The proliferation of negative stories in the media increases our perception of danger, explains unit head Simon Darnley. Any one of us has the potential to become paralysed by anxiety, but people can be cured. Three in four of those treated on the 12 week programme improve. 23-year-old James has an unusual anxiety - a profound fear that he’ll lose control of his bowels in public. Consequently he spends up to seven hours a day in the toilet. He’s been in and out of psychiatric institutions since he was a teenager and last year had to drop out of university. His mum, Penny, talks about how she’s lost the little boy she once knew and how she’s desperate for him to live a normal life again. For the last two years Helen’s lived the life of a recluse, too worried to leave the house or go to work. We see her doing a practical experiment, learning to confront her fear by walking down a busy London street. Exercises like these are part of learning to separate feelings from facts, Darnley explains. Helen suffers a setback when she sees an abandoned car outside the hospital, believing she is responsible. The unit’s therapists are trained not to reassure patients when they start to obsess, to avoid giving credence to irrational thoughts. The behaviours of James and Helen are driven by a less well known aspect of OCD called intrusive thoughts. Darnley explains that we all have involuntary, fleeting thoughts but most are able to dismiss them. His patients, however, become extremely worried, acting on the anxiety which in turn prolongs it. James’ intrusive thoughts relate to incest and paedophilia. In the ‘80s Darnley saw people who were convinced they’d somehow caught HIV. More recently the unit has seen an increase in people who fear becoming a paedophile. This, Darnley believes, is a direct result of the media witch hunt around paedophilia. Halfway through the programme, James’ anxieties appear to be improving. But spending time at home over Christmas triggers intrusive thoughts. Back on the unit, we see him confront his ’OCD bully’. He continues to make progress and leaves the unit full of hope for the future. Six months on he returns to university. Helen too, is reaching the end of the programme. Although her fears have not disappeared entirely, she has since been able to return to work.