What is The Secret Illness? It is a global community that explores the realities of living with obsessive compulsive disorder through the Creative Arts.

What is it’s purpose? OCD is an often mis-understood and trivialised mental illness. We want to change that.

How to achieve this purpose? By creating written, audio and visual expressions of what OCD means to those living with the disorder and developing a space where these can be shared with the OCD community and the wider public.

The Secret Illness was set up by Liz Smith, Becca Laidler and Steph Coen in 2016. After three years of dedicated work by the founders and a wonderful team of volunteers, and some really impactful creative outputs we decided it was time to bring our activity to a natural close. We are keeping the website up and running as a resource for anyone wanting to find out more about OCD.

While we are no longer actively working on this creative arts project, we’re still here, so please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.