7 Celebrities With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

In a 2020 article she wrote for The Wall Street Journal, Cabello shared how shame and stigma led her to bottle up her struggles with anxiety and OCD for a long time. “The little voice in my head was telling me that if I was honest about my mental health struggle and my internal battles, people would think there was something wrong with me, or that I wasn’t strong, or that I couldn't handle things,” wrote the “Havana” singer.

“That same little voice also told me maybe I was being ungrateful for all the good in my life — and that hiding the open wound I’d been avoiding the last few years was the easiest and fastest solution,” she added.

Cognitive behavioral therapy, meditation, breath work, and self-care all helped Cabello learn to manage her OCD. She also emphasizes that conversations about mental health are just as important as those about physical health, when it comes to getting help. “Far from being a sign of weakness, owning our struggles and taking the steps to heal is powerful,” Cabello wrote.

Stranger Things and Riverdale actor Shannon Purser opened up about having OCD, depression, and suicidal thoughts in a 2018 article she wrote for Teen Vogue.

As a teenager growing up in a religious household, obsessive thoughts and fears about lying and being insincere when talking to others led Purser to compulsively rephrase her sentences so that she could feel at peace inside. One example: “I could no longer say simple things like ‘I’m sorry’ because, I thought, what if I wasn’t really sorry? That would make me a liar. And being a liar was wrong,” she wrote.

Eventually Purser found that she could no longer rephrase her sentences in ways that quelled her obsessive thoughts, so she stopped talking altogether. “I grew to believe that I was evil, disgusting, and perverted,” she wrote.

Another compulsion Purser struggled with was needing to reread sentences in books and schoolwork over and over again until she was confident she had fully grasped the material.

Ultimately, she read an article about OCD that helped her connect the dots and recognize that she had the condition. “It was overwhelmingly comforting to finally realize that I wasn’t alone and that nothing was wrong with me. It was a treatable disorder,” she wrote.

A combination of therapy and medication for OCD and depression helped Purser learn to love life again. “My problems didn’t go away, but they became much easier to face,” she wrote.

“I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as an adult, but I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have them,” Deal or No Deal host and America’s Got Talent judge Howie Mandel wrote in a March 2022 magazine article for ADDitude.

Growing up in the 1960s, Mandel explained, there were no words to describe the symptoms he was experiencing — they were simply viewed as “quirks.” But even now that both OCD and ADHD are well known, Mandel still sometimes fears judgment and stigma. “I have to admit that, at times, I’ve been afraid of being labeled ‘crazy,’” he wrote.

Today, Mandel explained, he manages his OCD and ADHD with medication and psychotherapy. His wife, Terry, and their children have gone to therapy, too, to help them cope with his conditions.

His advice for people who suspect they may have OCD or ADHD? “Get diagnosed and get help. Your life will be much better for doing so,” Mandel wrote.

Suga (aka Agust D), a member of the South Korean boy band BTS, uses his global fame and popularity to share the ups and downs of living with a psychiatric illness. In his song, “The Last,” Suga raps, “It’s a bit dangerous. Depression. OCD. They keep coming back again from time to time.”

And Suga talked directly about his battle with depression in an interview with Rolling Stone that was published in 2021, explaining that his symptoms come and go. “It’s almost like cold weather. It may come back in a cycle over a year, year and a half,” he said.

Suga underscored the importance of talking about mental health struggles rather than bottling them up. “For anybody, these emotions are not something that need to be hidden,” he told Rolling Stone. “They need to be discussed and expressed. Whatever emotions that I may be feeling, I’m always ready to express them now.”

In an article for The New Yorker in 2014, Dunham, the creator of the HBO series Girls, spoke openly about being a child with OCD. Writing from the perspective of her 8-year-old self, she painted a portrait of a little girl struggling with obsessive thoughts and extreme fears about everything from appendicitis, leprosy, and dirty shoelaces to “foods my mother hasn’t tasted first so that if we die we die together.”

“I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear,” Dunham continued. “Every morning when I wake up, there is one blissful second before I look around the room and remember my many terrors.”

One day, while at a beauty salon with her mother, Dunham came across an article about a woman’s experience with OCD. In that moment, it clicked that she, too, likely had OCD.

These days, Dunham continues to tell her story to raise awareness and offer hope to others living with OCD. In a 2017 interview with Vogue, she spoke of wanting to foster a world in which we’re “teaching kids from a young age that it’s as okay to say ‘I’m anxious’ as it is to say ‘I hit my knee.’”

Transformers and Jennifer’s Body star Megan Fox revealed in a 2010 interview with Allure that she went to therapy both as a child and an adult to learn to cope with an intense fear of germs that compelled her to wash hands so often that her knuckles bled.

While therapy helped Fox get her excessive handwashing under control, she continued to struggle 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,” Fox explained. “All day and every day. 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.”

The star of Netflix’s Lady Dynamite, Maria Bamford, has been very candid about having OCD. In fact, as a comedian, she often turns to humor to talk about life with OCD, as well as her struggles with bipolar disorder and suicidal thoughts.

In a 2016 interview with NPR, Bamford described OCD like this: “What it is, it’s the equivalent of, you know, washing your hands, thinking that you’re going to be dirty or that you’re somehow dirty, but it’s with thoughts. So as soon as you try to not think of the thought, the thought pops up again so —  ’cause most of us have weird thoughts floating through our heads every once in a while.”

Bamford said she recalled having obsessive thoughts as early as age 9. “I stopped being able to sleep at night ’cause I had fear that I was going to kill my parents, you know, act out violently in some sort of taboo way. And it’s even hard for me to say now, act out sexually, toward something, somebody, and so I wanted to isolate so that I would not be around people at all and would stay up all night making sure that I just wouldn’t fall asleep and somehow lose control,” she explained.

In 2014, Bamford received the inaugural Illumination Award from the International OCD Foundation — an award given to influencers and media personalities who’ve talked about OCD and related disorders in an accurate and respectful way.