1.Thoughts arrive that I do not want, that feel alien, and that horrify or disgust me.
2.The thoughts attach to whatever I care about most — my children, my partner, my faith, my integrity.
3.There is something specific I do to make the feeling stop — checking, washing, asking, reviewing, praying, researching.
4.That thing has to be done a certain way, or a certain number of times, or until it feels right.
5.It works — and the relief lasts minutes to hours, not days.
6.Over time I need to do more of it, or do it more precisely, to get the same relief.
7.A lot of what I do about it happens entirely in my head — reviewing, arguing with it, checking a memory, mentally reassuring myself.
8.What I am really after is certainty, and no answer is ever quite enough.
9.I avoid places, people, objects, words, or situations to stop the thoughts being triggered.
10.This takes up more than an hour a day, counting the thinking.
11.Part of me knows the fear is excessive or unlikely, and that does not help at all.
12.I have had thoughts of ending my life because of the distress this causes.
Why the questions ignore the content
Because the content is the least informative part of OCD. The same illness produces contamination fears in one person and thoughts about harming a child in the next, and the treatment is essentially identical. The mechanism is the diagnosis, which is why these questions ask about rules, relief, escalation and certainty rather than about what you’re afraid of.
The question that does most of the work is the one about mental compulsions. An enormous number of people go a decade without diagnosis because their rituals are entirely internal and nobody thought to ask.
Read this before you take it again
If you find yourself retaking this, or reading the result repeatedly, or wondering whether you answered one question accurately enough — notice what that is. Retaking a quiz to settle a feeling is the compulsion, performed on this page.
This isn’t a diagnosis and it can’t become one however many times you run it. The answer to a doubt disorder never arrives from outside.