Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Dec 28, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 28, 2020 - Feb 22, 2021
Date Accepted: Jan 28, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
The COVID-19 Pandemic's Impact on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Survey of Online Support Community Users
ABSTRACT
Background:
People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have faced unique challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research from the first two months of the pandemic suggested that between 7% and 37% of people with OCD experienced worsening in their OCD symptoms since the pandemic began, while the rest experienced either no change or an improvement in their symptoms. However, as society-level factors relating to the pandemic have evolved, the pandemic’s impacts on people with OCD have likely changed as well, in complex and population-specific ways. Therefore, this work contributes to a growing body of knowledge on the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on people, and demonstrates how differences across studies might emerge when studying specific populations and at specific timepoints.
Objective:
Our study aimed to learn how members of online OCD peer support communities felt the COVID-19 pandemic had impacted their OCD symptoms, 3-4 months after the pandemic began.
Methods:
We recruited participants from online OCD peer support communities for our brief survey. Participants indicated how much they felt their OCD symptoms had changed since the pandemic began, and how much they felt that having OCD was making it harder to deal with the pandemic.
Results:
196 people responded to our survey, although some participants skipped some questions. Among non-missing data, 65.9% (108/164) of respondents were from the United States and 90.5% (152/168) had been subjected to a stay-at-home order. 92.9% (182/196) of respondents said they experienced worsening of their OCD symptoms since the pandemic began, although the extent to which symptoms worsened differed across dimensions of OCD, with symmetry and completeness symptoms less likely than others to have worsened. 95.5% (171/179) of respondents felt that having OCD made it harder to deal with the pandemic.
Conclusions:
Our study of online OCD peer support community members found a considerably higher rate of OCD symptom worsening than did other studies of people with OCD during the pandemic. Factors such as quarantine length, location, overlapping society-level challenges, and differing measurement and sampling choices may help to explain this difference across studies.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.