Mental Attitude: Good News if You are Obsessive-Compulsive

Research that involved questioning nearly 800 university students from sixteen countries shows that 94% of people experience unwanted, intrusive thoughts, images, and/or impulses. These findings confirm that these thoughts are extremely common, which can reassure obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients that they are not that different from everyone else in this regard. Co-author Dr. Adam Radomsky explains, “This study shows that it’s not the unwanted, intrusive thoughts that are the problem – it’s what you make of those thoughts. And that’s at the heart of our cognitive and behavioral interventions for helping people overcome OCD.”
Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorder, April 2014