9 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Living With Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Howie Mandel has opened up about being diagnosed with OCD, and how the condition is often mischaracterized. He told Today.com that "you can’t have a little OCD" because the condition is actually debilitating.

"I can’t tell you how many people come up to me and go, 'Oh, yeah, I’m a little OCD, too. I like everything in order. If my room is not clean, I’m just not happy. I've got a little OCD,'" he said. But this is not what OCD is. Howie's OCD was misunderstood for many years. He wasn't diagnosed until he was in 40s but struggled with the condition since he was a child.

In 2010, he told Everyday Health that he has struggled with obsessions related to germs and contamination to the point that he would frequently take showers and wouldn't tie his shoes when he was a kid because the laces had touched the ground.

"I’ve been really successful. I have a beautiful family, and I love what I do. But inside my head, it is a war zone, and it’s a war worth fighting, and I continue to fight it," he told Today.com.

Leonardo DiCaprio is less outspoken about living with OCD, but the topic came up years ago while he was working on the 2004 film The Aviator. In the film, Leo portrays billionaire and aviation tycoon Howard Hughes, who lived with OCD. In 2005, Leo said that he struggled with "not stepping on cracks, or not stepping on certain things" and walking through the doorway multiple times, reported Express.

"Sometimes it took me ten minutes to get to the set because I'd be pacing back and forth, stepping on gum stains," he revealed at the time, as per DigitalSpy.

More from LittleThings: Michael J. Fox Makes Surprise Appearance At Glastonbury Festival, Performs With Coldplay

Actress Amanda Seyfried has struggled with health anxiety, driving, and using the stove as a result of living with OCD. In 2012, she told In Style that for her, at that point, OCD was largely manageable, but she wanted to overcome her "fear of driving over bridges and through tunnels."

In 2016, she told Allure that she was taking medication for her mental health. She also spoke about her fears related to using the stove ("You could so easily burn down something if you leave the stove on. Or the oven.") and dealing with her health anxiety.

"I had pretty bad health anxiety that came from the OCD and thought I had a tumor in my brain," she told the outlet at the time. "I had an MRI, and the neurologist referred me to a psychiatrist."

Daniel Radcliffe has said that he started experiencing symptoms of OCD as a child. "I had to repeat every sentence I said under my breath," the Harry Potter actor previously told The Sun. He also encouraged people who are struggling with their mental health to get help. "I would encourage everyone to undergo therapy," he said. "I haven't had [therapy] this year so far, and I'm missing it."

Singer Camila Cabello wrote about her mental health challenges for WSJ Magazine in 2020. At the time, she described OCD as feeling "like my mind was playing a cruel trick on me."

She said she experienced "constant, unwavering, relentless anxiety that made day-to-day life painfully hard." Finding "the right therapist and the right medication" made OCD easier to cope with, as per The Independent.

In a 2010 interview with Allure, Megan Fox spoke about how her fear of germs was not merely a preference or a quirk — it became obvious that it was a serious problem, as her hand washing was so frequent that it made her knuckles bleed.

"I said, 'This is a sickness, I have an illness, this has moved beyond, Oh, I need my hands to be clean – this is not OK anymore,'" the actress said at the time. She also spoke about struggling with obsessive thoughts.

"People can’t imagine what the struggle is really like, when you can’t let go of a thought or a word," she told the outlet. "All day and everyday. And I can engage in a conversation with someone and seem like I’m present, and the whole time I’m in my own head thinking about something else, worrying about something else."

When Jennette McCurdy, iCarly actress and author, was a child, she worried that if she didn't do certain rituals (compulsions), her mom would die, she explained on the All Of It podcast.

"I thought that my OCD was the Holy Ghost speaking to me," she explained. "And I thought that the Holy Ghost was helping me to keep my mom alive and if I didn’t continue with my, what I know now as OCD rituals, my mom would die."

Later, when her mom was diagnosed with cancer, she worried that it was her fault. "I still felt that I was to blame, that somehow maybe I hadn’t done my rituals right and had caused mom’s cancer," she said.

Comedian Maria Bamford has used her platform to talk about stigmatized topics, including her experience living with OCD. In a 2023 interview with NPR, Maria explained that everyone has "weird" thoughts sometimes, and people who don't have OCD might acknowledge that the thought was kind of weird then move on. For people with OCD, having those kinds of thoughts is different, she explained. She said people with OCD might think, "That means something about me. I've got to get — I got to make sure I never have that thought again."

As a child, she struggled with harm-related obsessions, but there are lots of different kinds of obsessions that people might have. "There's religious obsessions, there's ethical obsessions. There's — one that's very common is with new mothers who have — that they're afraid they're going to hurt their baby," she told NPR.

Stranger Things actress Shannon Purser wrote about living with OCD in a 2018 Teen Vogue essay. In the essay, she wrote about how many people have false perceptions of OCD because "people like to casually diagnose themselves with it, saying things like, 'I hate when things are messy, I’m so OCD.'"

She also wrote about some of the obsessions and compulsions she dealt with, including re-reading sentences because she feared that she wasn't actually absorbing information.

Her fear of lying also led her to rephrasing what she was saying or simply not speaking at all. "As a teenager, my OCD seized that fear of dishonesty and manipulated me with it," she explained. "I became obsessed with the idea that I was being insincere. I could no longer say simple things like 'I’m sorry' because, I thought, what if I wasn’t really sorry?"