Mark Hoppus and obsessive-compulsive disorder: “When I realized that my brain was trying to sabothed me”

Mark Hoppus has spent years living with Anxieties and rituals that could not be explaineduntil one day he had a clear diagnosis: obsessive-compulsive disorder. Tells it in Fahrenheit-182his new Memoir, where he retraces dark and surprising moments of his life inside and outside the Blink-182. The bassist and singer, today 53 years old, reveals that he has discovered that he suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder in 2008after years passed between intrusive thoughts and behaviors that he himself defines as “obsessive”: “I had become intensely paranoid about germs. I was constantly worried about my health», He writes.

In the book Remember to have washed his hands “obsessively” every time he tightened his hand to someoneopened a door or touched “the dirty exterior of the disinfectant for the hands”. During a tour in Mexico, where he had been advised not to drink tap water, he had come to wash his teeth only with bottled water and avoid shower for days. “I didn’t even use tap water to wash my teeth,” he writes. At the Four Seasons, he claimed to eat only pre -packaged food brought from home.

The situation, he says, worsened after the break with Tom Delonge and the plane crash From 2008 in which Travis Barker, the band’s drummer, was saved while two friends died. “Even the most rational person could hardly think that the world was conspiring to kill us all,” he writes.

When the official diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder came, he finally gave a name to something that had been tormented for some time. “I was talking to my wife (Skye Everly, ed), she said to me:” But what are you talking about? What you say does not make sense “. At that time I went to a psychiatrist and he said to me: “This is what you have”. And I thought: “Well, it makes sense” ». And he adds: «It was a bit like, Ok, now I can give him a name. Now I can start to face it».

But the first instinct was not to take care of: “My instinctive reaction was that I only had to overcome it”. Then he understood that it was not so simple. “But Your brain tries to eat yourself and poison yourselfand sometimes, for me, it is impossible to stop it ». To get out of it, he admits, there was a mix of things: “It takes drugs, friends, bandmates, family and everything else to put my world back in place”.

It was not easy. When Covid’s pandemic exploded in 2020, Mark Hoppus had a strange feeling of confirmation: “My anxiety had been validated”. And, even today, “I still have days when I look for reassurance from my wife. I tell her: “I’m crazy to think this thing, right?”. And she replies: “Yes. It’s a ridiculous thing to think” ».