He feels their pain. He gives them hope. He defends the nerds. To millions of his young fans, John Green is a towering figure and a beacon of truth. He does it all in a series of best-selling novels, YouTube “vlogs” and podcasts that have captured the attention of their generation. But what many of those fans don’t know is that Green has his own pain. He struggles every day with mental illness. Green, whose young adult bestsellers have become blockbuster films, appears on 60 Minutes in a profile by Jon Wertheim to be broadcast Sunday, Oct. 7 at 7:00 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
Green suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. He describes his illness as a spiraling of thoughts that is difficult to stop. Green gives Wertheim a hypothetical example, “It might be that I am eating a salad and it suddenly occurs to me that somebody might have bled into this salad… that thought just expands and expands and then I use compulsive behaviors to manage the worry…”
Exercise helps distract him from the effects of OCD. “I have a few strategies. I exercise. That’s probably the biggest thing. Exercise is pretty magical in my life,” he tells Wertheim. “I don’t enjoy it. I don’t relish the thought of going for a run, but it is very helpful because I can’t think.”
Green confronted his illness head-on by writing “Turtles All the Way Down,” a best-seller that has OCD as its theme. “I wanted to try and give people a glimpse of what [OCD] is… put them… at least a little bit, inside of that experience.”
While exercise and other coping measures are helpful, the anti-anxiety medication he has been taking for years is just as important. He knows because he tried to get off it.
“I bought into this old romantic lie, that in order to write well, you need to… be free of these mind-altering substances,” he says. “The consequences were really dire, unfortunately. I’m lucky they weren’t catastrophic.”
His ability to control his illness has enabled him to manage and enjoy his lucrative career. His young-adult genre books are naturals for film-going teens and young adults, the largest group by age to attend theaters. The film version of his novel “The Fault in Our Stars” grossed more than $300 million.
“I have a really wonderful life,” he tells Wertheim. “I also have a pretty serious chronic mental health problem. And those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
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