Leavell-Bruce, noting that the fear can manifest in many different ways, depending on the person.Įven the most seasoned clinician can have trouble distinguishing between healthy identity questioning and OCD, says Terence Ching, PhD, a postdoctoral associate at the Yale OCD Research Clinic. “It’s about living a lie or being a fraud,” says Dr. And while heterosexual people have long been seen as the primary sufferers of SO-OCD-hence the question about “homosexual thoughts” that popped up during my diagnostic-SO-OCD can affect anyone of any gender or sexual orientation and can develop at any age. Leavell-Bruce recalls HOCD being commonly in use around 2013, towards the beginning of her practice. Though it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when SO-OCD became the more accepted term, Dr. Until very recently, SO-OCD was generally referred to as “homosexual OCD” (HOCD) or “gay OCD,” and was thought to specifically afflict heterosexual people. Had the question been more open ended-asking for instance, if I ever had doubts about my sexual orientation-there’s a better chance that it would have been flagged the intensity and quality of those thoughts felt exactly like my other OCD obsessions. While I was properly diagnosed with OCD, my SO-OCD subset was not flagged because the diagnostic did not factor in the possibility of SO-OCD beyond “homosexual thoughts,” which wasn’t relevant to me. Additionally, there are therapists operating with a limited understanding of what SO-OCD looks like in all its forms, which may mean they miss it, as I experienced firsthand. So these rates are likely higher,” says Dr. “Sexual obsessions are underreported because they’re taboo. With OCD impacting up to 3 million adults in the U.S., it’s possible that anywhere from 300,000 to 375,000 people suffer from SO-OCD.Īnd that number could easily be an undercount.
Stranger still, I realized the problem it was supposed to suss out was actually one I’d been struggling with for years-one I’d assumed was just garden variety sexual-identity questioning.Īlthough it’s not as well-known as OCD subsets like contamination OCD (an obsessive fear of germs and infection) or compulsive counting and ordering, sexual orientation OCD (SO-OCD) is a very real, and very painful, manifestation of OCD that’s estimated to afflict about 10 to 12 percent of OCD patients, says clinical psychologist Simone Leavell-Bruce, PsyD. (He, for the record, was gay, and merely reading the question off an official diagnostic form.) But years later, when I thought about that clumsily-phrased question, I was finally able to piece together what, exactly, it was supposed to be screening for. In the moment, though, I laughed it off, reminding my therapist that I was bisexual and thus obviously had homosexual thoughts. But this question felt completely out of left field-and as a bisexual woman, I was more than a bit offended. I was sitting in my therapist’s office in Brooklyn, answering his questions from an OCD diagnostic test, when he asked me something particularly unexpected.ĭo I have homosexual thoughts? Over the course of the diagnostic, I’d been asked a number of odd questions, including ones about my hygiene habits, whether I tend to visualize violent scenarios, and whether I believe numbers have magical meanings.