Prevalence of OCD

OCD doesn’t discriminate.  It affects children and adults of both genders, all races and ethnicities.  It occurs in every socioeconomic level and in all parts of the U.S. and the world. Among school-aged children in the U.S., about one in 100 has OCD.

Some people wonder how OCD could grow from a little-known condition just a few decades ago to one of much larger proportion today.  They ask if OCD is some new form of disorder brought about by the way our society is changing, or if parents are doing something differently today that has caused a spike in the prevalence of this disorder.

Factors Affecting OCD Diagnosis

OCD is not new, but today much more is known about this neurobiological anxiety disorder than ever before.  To put it in perspective, consider that there were no consumer books written about OCD until the late 1980s and medical research did not begin until just a few decades ago.  Information was not readily available via the Internet until relatively recently.

This meant few tools were available in the past to help doctors understand OCD -- or to help struggling parents make sense of a child’s unusual behavior and help them treat that behavior.  Many families never asked their family physician for help, and those who did were often disappointed because family doctors and pediatricians did not have information about any illness that matched the symptoms the child was exhibiting.

In many parts of the U.S., parents did not have access to mental health professionals. And the stigma of having a child with a mental illness caused many families to try to hide the truth for fear of gossip, discrimination and shame. So experts now believe that, while OCD was certainly present in children (and adults) in the past,  the number of OCD cases was very much under diagnosed, which might give the impression that OCD is a “new” disorder today, or that there is an “outbreak” of OCD. 

Unfortunately, some of the problems of the past still hold true today. Access to mental health services is affected by factors such as location (e.g., individuals in rural areas frequently have less access to services), socioeconomic status (e.g., individuals in lower socioeconomic levels often do not have the means to seek help), and stigma (some cultures associate mental illness with shame). Moreover, there remains a lack of professionals who are knowledgeable about and trained in therapies used specifically for OCD. Therefore, despite recent improvements in the accurate and timely diagnosis of OCD, many children are still misdiagnosed or undiagnosed.

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