How Is OCD Severity Rated?

How Is OCD Severity Rated? (1:03)

Obsessive compulsive disorder is rated on a scale of 0 to 40 using an assessment test called a Y-BOCS. Find out more about this test in this video with Wayne Goodman, MD, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

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We are very interested in normally diagnosing OCD, differentiating it from other disorders, but also rating the severity. It's about 25 years ago I developed a rating instrument for assessing OCD and rating symptoms severity, and that's called the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale or the Y-BOCS.

And that scale ranges from zero, which is no symptoms, to 40 which would be extreme. The Y-BOCS which measures symptoms severity assesses how much time the patients spend occupied by obsessions and compulsions, how distressing those symptoms are, how much they interfere with their functioning, how much they can control them.