When my daughter was young, she washed her hands a lot. We might have poked what we thought was gentle fun at her, saying she was “a little bit OCD”. Later, she began to disclose “bad thoughts”, which ...

Roughly 163 million people experience obsessive-compulsive disorder and its associated cycles of obsessions and compulsions. They have unwanted intrusive thoughts, images or urges; they also do ...

You must have heard people recklessly throwing around the term ‘OCD’ whenever they want to convey how much they love orderliness and cleanliness, which brings us to the biggest myth surrounding OCD.

I got a call from a psychiatrist colleague of mine a while back. He was an old-school Freudian psychoanalyst who had his patients come in twice a week to lie on a couch, talk about their dreams, ...

Mental compulsions are repetitive acts played in the mind in response to intrusive, unwanted thoughts. Just like physical compulsions, these mental behaviors are intended to reduce anxiety or prevent ...

Contamination OCD is a subtype, or “theme,” of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It includes persistent fear of contamination and an overwhelming need to clean oneself and objects. OCD involves ...

Trichotillomania is a condition involving frequent urges to pull out one’s hair. Experts now consider it closely related to OCD due to the obsessive-compulsive nature of the disorder. Mental health ...