"Quotes from www.apa.org"

The billionaire Howard Hughes an aviator, motion-picture producer and business tycoon, spent most of his life trying to avoid germs. The phobia grew so severe that it might have contributed to Hughes's reclusiveness in the two decades before his death from heart failure in 1976.

Nearly two years after his death, Hughes's estate attorney called on former APA CEO Raymond D. Fowler, PhD, to conduct a psychological autopsy to determine Hughes's mental and emotional condition in his last years and to help understand the origins of his mental disorder.

That research led Fowler to believe that Hughes's fear for his health most likely emerged from his childhood. Hughes's mother was constantly worried about her son's exposure to germs, terrified that he would catch polio, a major health threat at the time. His mother checked him every day for diseases and was cautious about what he ate.

Hughes's fear of germs grew throughout his life, and he concurrently developed obsessive-compulsive symptoms around efforts to protect himself from germs. Ironically, Hughes ended up neglecting his own hygiene later in his life, rarely bathing or brushing his teeth.
Source(s):
http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug05/hughes.html


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