Frequency
According to Baer, most people who suffer bad or unacceptable thoughts have not identified themselves as having OCD, because they may not have what they believe to be classic symptoms of OCD, such as handwashing. Yet, he says, epidemiological studies suggest that intrusive thoughts are the most common kind of OCD worldwide; if people in the United States with intrusive thoughts gathered, they would form the fourth-largest city in the US, following New York City and Chicago. A 2007 study found that 78% of a clinical sample of OCD patients had intrusive images.
The prevalence of OCD in every culture studied is at least 2% of the population, and the majority of those have obsessions, or bad thoughts, only; this results in a conservative estimate of more than 2 million sufferers in the United States alone (as of 2000). One author estimates that one in 50 adults has OCD and about 10–20% of these have sexual obsessions. A recent study found that 25% of 293 patients with a primary diagnosis of OCD had a history of sexual obsessions.
Read more about this topic: Intrusive Thoughts
Famous quotes containing the word frequency:
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—Jean Marzollo (20th century)
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—Rebecca West (1892–1983)