Health Provider Checklist for Adolescent and Young Adult Males

Mental Health

Obsessive Compulsive and Related Disorders

Key Points

  • DSM-5 includes a new chapter on Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders to reflect the increasing evidence of these disorders’ relatedness to one another and distinction from other anxiety disorders, as well as to help clinicians better identify and treat individuals suffering from these disorders.
  • Disorders in this chapter include obsessive-compulsive disorder, body dysmorphic disorder and trichotillomania (hair-pulling disorder), as well as two new disorders: hoarding disorder and excoriation (skin-picking) disorder
  • Males with OCD are more likely to have comorbid disorders.

Questions to ask young male patients about Obsessive Compulsive and Related Disorders

Overview

DSM-5 includes a new chapter on Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders to reflect the increasing evidence of these disorders’ relatedness to one another and distinction from other anxiety disorders, as well as to help clinicians better identify and treat individuals suffering from these disorders.

Disorders grouped in this new chapter have features in common such as an obsessive preoccupation and repetitive behaviors. The disorders included in this new chapter have enough similarities to group them together in the same diagnostic classification but enough important differences between them to exist as distinct disorders.

Disorders in this chapter include obsessive-compulsive disorder, body dysmorphic disorder and trichotillomania (hair-pulling disorder), as well as two new disorders: hoarding disorder and excoriation (skin-picking) disorder.

OCD is characterized by the presence of obsessions and/or compulsions. Obsessions are recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges or images that are experienced as intrusive and wanted, whereas compulsions are repetitive behaviors or mental acts that an individual feels driven to perform in response to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly.1 Females are affected at slightly higher rates than males in adulthood, although males are more commonly affected in childhood.2 Males have an earlier age of onset than females: nearly 25% of males have onset before age 10 years.3 Males are more likely to have comorbid disorders. Gender differences in the pattern of symptom dimensions have been reported, with, for example, females more likely to have symptoms in the cleaning dimension and males more likely to have symptoms in the forbidden thought and symmetry dimension.4


1 American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Fifth Edition. 2013. P 237.

2 Ibid P 239

3 Ibid

4 Ibid P 240