Obsessive-compulsive disorder and Jewish religiosity.

In 1907 Freud (1941) was the first to note a similarity between religious and obsessive-compulsive behaviors, which he emphasized as the individual’s “private religion.” Other investigators (Akhtar et al., 1975) have suggested that obsessions and compulsions are culture-specific, with a crossover to religious behavior. Greenberg and Witztum (Greenberg and Witztum, 1994;Greenberg, 1984) discussed the difficulty in differentiating normal religious behaviors from OCD in religious patients. Hoffnung et al. (1989) stressed the importance of therapists’ full knowledge about the religion and religiosity of their Jewish patients with OCD. All these reports, however, were based on case series and qualitative patient assessments. In a more recent study, Rasmussen (1993) claimed that Catholics and Jews with a strict religious upbringing were more likely than patients with a more secular upbringing to develop religious, aggressive, and sexual obsessions. Mahgoub and AbdelHafeiz (1991) reported a higher rate of religious content in the symptoms of Muslims with OCD. Others (Fallon et al., 1990) found that religious scrupulousness responds well to anti-OCD treatment with serotonin reuptake inhibitors (e.g., fluoxetine and clomipramine).