What Is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?

Find a therapist to treat OCD

Men with OCD more often experience intrusive thoughts about harm, sex, or religion.

Shame and fear of judgment can keep men from disclosing their obsessive thoughts.

When doctors misunderstand these symptoms, misdiagnosis can lead to years without treatment.

Exposure and response prevention (ERP) is just as effective for men as it is for women.

When someone mentions OCD, what’s the first image to pop into your mind? Washing your hands too many times, perhaps, or repeatedly checking the oven before you go to bed? These common notions aren’t inaccurate, but unfortunately they show only one side of what’s actually quite a multifarious disorder: they’re the symptoms that occur most commonly in women. By contrast, men experience OCD in very different ways: their obsessive thoughts and repetitive behaviors don’t focus as often on themes of contamination, but instead on violence, sex, or religious blasphemy (to name a few). And this gender discrepancy creates other problems, too, making the experience of OCD a unique challenge for many men.

Broadly, the diagnosis of OCD shows huge differences according to sex: men are much more often misdiagnosed than women. Last year’s analysis by the International OCD Foundation (Deusser, 2025) found that nearly twice as many women as men had received an OCD diagnosis. The study went on to conclude that the inconsistency couldn’t be explained by the disorder itself, which doesn’t discriminate by sex. Neither was it due to any failure to seek help by OCD sufferers (as a study by Wongbusarakum et al. found in 2025). Instead, the gender difference in OCD incidence appears to be caused by a bias in the way men and women are diagnosed. To put it plainly, the OCD symptom constellations occurring most often in men are harder for their doctors to recognize, so the diagnosis is often not applied. Men with OCD then end up living with the disorder for a long time before it’s recognized: according to the IOCDF, delays between the onset of men’s symptoms and the establishment of a diagnosis often last as long as seven years, and can even go as high as seventeen — meaning that a large number of men end up struggling alone with their symptoms for over a decade.

As I noted above, OCD more often presents........

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