Mental health self-check
Free OCD Test — Online Symptom Self-Check
Fifteen questions about obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours over the past month, covering the five themes OCD most often takes. Your answers stay in this browser unless you choose to print, save, or share. This is an educational self-reflection tool rather than a validated questionnaire, and the result below explains exactly what that distinction means.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a real OCD test?
It is a real self-check, and it is not a validated psychometric instrument. The fifteen items were written in-house and grouped by the five symptom themes that research consistently identifies in OCD, but the scale has not been through a validation study, so it has no established cutoff, sensitivity or specificity, and we do not publish any. The two instruments clinicians actually use are the Y-BOCS, a structured interview a clinician administers, and the OCI-R, a validated self-report scale that requires its authors' permission to reproduce. Use this page to organise what you are experiencing before a conversation, not to settle the question.
Can an online test diagnose OCD?
No, and that is true of every online OCD test including the ones built on validated scales. A diagnosis requires a clinician to establish that obsessions or compulsions are present, that they consume significant time or cause significant distress or impairment, and that the picture is not better explained by another condition, a substance, or a medical cause. A questionnaire cannot check the last of those. What a self-check can usefully do is give you concrete language and a starting point.
What are the main types of OCD?
OCD is one diagnosis, but its content clusters into recognisable themes, and this self-check is built around five of them: contamination and washing; checking and pathological doubt; symmetry, ordering and the need for things to feel right; unacceptable intrusive thoughts, often violent, sexual, or religious in content; and reassurance seeking or mental rituals. Many people have more than one theme, and themes often shift over time. The theme is mostly a description of content; the mechanism underneath is the same, and so is the treatment.
I get disturbing intrusive thoughts. Does that mean I am dangerous?
No. Harm-themed intrusive thoughts are a well-described and common presentation of OCD, and they are the opposite of intent. They are ego-dystonic, meaning they run against the person's values, which is exactly why they cause such distress. People with harm obsessions are typically the most careful and least likely to act; the fear is the symptom. Research on intrusive thoughts in non-clinical populations finds that the large majority of people experience unwanted disturbing thoughts. This is also why we do not treat an answer on the intrusive-thoughts items as a risk signal: doing so would be clinically wrong and would frighten precisely the people who most need clear information.
Does repeatedly taking OCD tests online make it worse?
It can, and this is worth saying plainly on a page like this one. Searching for certainty and re-testing to settle a worry are themselves reassurance behaviours, and reassurance is a compulsion. It relieves anxiety briefly and strengthens the cycle over the longer run. If you have taken several of these tests and the relief keeps wearing off, that pattern is itself more informative than any of the scores, and it is worth mentioning to a clinician.
What is the treatment for OCD?
The psychological treatment with the strongest evidence is exposure and response prevention (ERP), a specific form of cognitive behavioural therapy in which you approach what triggers the obsession while not performing the compulsion, so the anxiety is allowed to fall on its own. NICE and comparable guidelines list it as first-line. SSRI medication is also well established, often at higher doses than are used for depression, and the two are frequently combined. General talking therapy that focuses on analysing why you have a particular thought tends to work less well for OCD, so it is reasonable to ask a prospective therapist directly whether they deliver ERP.
About this self-check
This is an original Symptomatik self-check, written in-house. It has not been psychometrically validated, so it has no established cutoff, sensitivity, specificity or reliability coefficient, and none is claimed anywhere on this page. Its fifteen items are grouped by the five symptom themes that factor-analytic research consistently finds in OCD: contamination and washing, checking and doubt, symmetry and the need for things to feel right, unwanted intrusive thoughts, and reassurance seeking or mental rituals. The instruments clinicians actually use are the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS), which is a structured interview administered by a clinician rather than a questionnaire, and the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised (OCI-R), which is a validated self-report scale that requires permission from its authors to reproduce. We hold no such permission, which is why the items here are our own.
Read the full guide to OCD symptoms and assessment →
References
- American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders. 2022.
- Goodman WK, Price LH, Rasmussen SA, et al. The Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale. I. Development, use, and reliability. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1989;46(11):1006-1011.
- Foa EB, Huppert JD, Leiberg S, et al. The Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory: development and validation of a short version. Psychol Assess. 2002;14(4):485-496.
- Mataix-Cols D, Rosario-Campos MC, Leckman JF. A multidimensional model of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Am J Psychiatry. 2005;162(2):228-238.
- National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Obsessive-compulsive disorder and body dysmorphic disorder: treatment. Clinical guideline CG31.
What this score can and cannot tell you
The number above has no validated meaning, and it is worth being precise about why. A validated scale earns its cutoffs by being administered to hundreds of people whose diagnostic status is already known by other means, so that a specific score can be shown to separate the groups at a measurable rate. That work has not been done for this scale. The bands here are simply quartiles of the possible range, described in plain language. They tell you how much you endorsed, which is a real piece of information, but they cannot tell you how likely you are to have OCD, and any page that claims otherwise about a scale like this one is overstating what it has.
What actually distinguishes OCD from ordinary experience is not the presence of the thoughts or behaviours, because those are close to universal. It is three things, none of which this total measures well. Time: the conventional threshold is more than an hour a day spent on obsessions and compulsions combined, and people routinely underestimate this until they track it. Distress: how much the experience costs you emotionally, which is only loosely related to how often it happens. And interference: how much of your life has quietly rearranged itself around avoiding the trigger, which is the part people notice last, because avoidance feels like preference rather than symptom.
There is one more thing specific to a page like this. If you arrived here after taking several other online OCD tests, and the reassurance from each keeps wearing off within a day or two, that pattern is more diagnostic than any of the numbers you collected. Compulsive checking includes checking whether you have a disorder. The relief is real and it is short, and the search resumes. Noticing that loop is genuinely useful information to bring to a clinician, and the most helpful next step is usually to stop testing and start talking to someone.
How to bring this to a clinician
Do not lead with the score, because it carries no validated weight and a clinician will know that. Lead with the specifics, which are what an assessment is built from. The single most common reason OCD goes untreated for years is that people do not describe the intrusive thoughts, either because they feel too shameful to say out loud or because they fear the reaction. Clinicians who work with OCD hear these themes constantly and will not be alarmed.
What is worth bringing:
- Roughly how much time per day the thoughts and the behaviours take in total, counting the mental ones. An hour is the conventional marker, and most people underestimate before they count.
- What you avoid in order to prevent the discomfort starting, which is often the clearest measure of how far the pattern has spread.
- What happens when you try to resist: how the anxiety behaves, and how long you can hold out.
- Whether anyone else has been drawn in, such as a partner providing reassurance or a family member checking on your behalf.
- How long the pattern has been present, and whether it is growing.
- Whether low mood has arrived alongside it. Depression commonly accompanies OCD and can change the order in which things are treated.
An opening you can use as-is:
I think I might have OCD. I spend about [X] hours a day on [checking / washing / mental reviewing], I avoid [situations], and when I try to stop the anxiety gets much worse. I'd like to talk about an assessment.
A clinician will usually take a history across the symptom themes, ask about time, distress and interference, and rule out other explanations. If OCD is the working picture, the Y-BOCS is the usual instrument for measuring severity and tracking change. You can print this page or save it as a PDF from your browser's print menu.
If you're reading this with someone who took the self-check
The most useful thing to understand is that reassurance does not work, even though it is the natural thing to offer and even though the person may ask for it directly and repeatedly. Answering the question relieves their anxiety for a short time and makes the next question more likely, which is why families often find themselves answering the same question a dozen times a day and getting nowhere. This is not manipulation and it is not a lack of trust in you; it is the mechanism of the disorder.
What helps instead is to stay warm while declining to participate in the ritual, ideally in a way you have agreed with them in advance rather than sprung on them: acknowledging that the anxiety is real, saying that you are not going to answer the question again because you both agreed that answering makes it worse, and staying present while it passes. This is hard, and it is the same principle the treatment is built on.
The other common trap is accommodation, which is doing things to prevent the person's distress: checking locks on their behalf, buying particular cleaning products, taking over tasks that trigger them, adjusting routines around the avoidance. Family accommodation is well documented as a predictor of worse outcomes, and it grows so gradually that households often do not notice how much has changed. Reducing it works best when it is planned together, and when a clinician is involved.
If they mention thoughts of ending their life, take it seriously and help them get support today rather than treating it as another intrusive thought to be reasoned with. In the US, 988 reaches the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans is 116 123. In the EU, the emergency number is 112.
Other screens you might also take
OCD commonly travels with anxiety and depression, and the symptom overlap is real enough that a fuller picture usually needs more than one screen. These three are validated instruments, unlike the self-check above.