When you imagine depictions of obsessive-compulsive disorder in popular culture, you probably think of cleanliness practices like excessive hand washing. Or maybe you imagine common popular culture tropes of people being a “little OCD” because they like a neat desk or an organized closet.
But what happens when OCD looks less like these general depictions and more like praying endlessly?
This is the type of OCD Rev. Dr. Katie O’Dunne, DMin ’24, specializes in, researching at the intersection of faith and mental health and the ways “scrupulosity” can entangle meaningful religious practice with OCD-driven compulsions.
Scrupulosity is a manifestation of OCD that involves religious and moral obsessions. Individuals struggling with scrupulosity may be overly worried that their actions or thoughts are sinful or violate their religious doctrine.
“An individual’s compulsions can actually look like really devout religious practice,” says O’Dunne. “The reality is that person isn’t really finding any meaning in their practice. They’re very much actually kind of praying to OCD rather than God in a way where they are so stuck as opposed to actually connecting with the divine.”
O’Dunne didn’t land in this field through purely academic study. With a background in chaplaincy, student ministry and religious contexts, she spent many years hiding her own OCD symptoms for fear of what would happen if she openly shared her struggles in faith communities.
What she found instead was that sharing her story opened doors for more people with similar concerns and struggles who needed a place to turn. Since then, O’Dunne has shifted to focus on caring for individuals with OCD and researching the ways religious communities and individuals are impacted. In 2022, she founded Stick with the Ick, a robust virtual platform that brings together clinicians, clergy and people with OCD in an interfaith space. She also partners with the International OCD Foundation to run the Faith and OCD Conference, an annual one day event where speakers from multiple disciplines and faith backgrounds converge to talk about all things faith, OCD and scrupulosity.
When O’Dunne began her time at Vanderbilt in the doctor of ministry in integrative chaplaincy program, she was still serving in a school chaplaincy role and wanted to step into roles more specifically focused on mental health.
“My professors and mentors in that program gave me a lot of strength and courage and the foundation to lay an ethical framework for doing chaplaincy work in a more non-traditional setting,” she says.
Through the program, she focused on reimagining evidence-based treatments for OCD as spiritual practice, and countering some of the inherent misconceptions around treatment within faith communities.
“We really can help folks understand that treatment in and of itself can be a leap of faith and a spiritual practice,” she shares.
She continues to pursue ways to bring more education to the field of OCD and incorporate religious perspectives, as well as more awareness to faith communities about OCD. Recently, she teamed up with colleagues from Baylor College of Medicine to research the relationship between grief, loss and OCD.
“We talk all the time in the OCD space that grief has something to do with OCD, and this was really the first study that pointed out that grief has an impact before onset of OCD, during, and after, and that we also experience grief due to the things that have been lost to OCD.”
O’Dunne was invited into the project due to her work with individuals with OCD from a religious perspective and hopes to continue research that will highlight the effects of religious practice on mental health.
“My work and research is primarily focused on the way that mental health support can bring people closer to their faith, and I’ve seen so many people across faith traditions engage in treatment in a way that they’re no longer really worshipping OCD, but actually connecting with God in an authentic way.”
O’Dunne has a book planned to release next year that draws on research, her professional work and her own lived experience with OCD to explore religious and moral scrupulosity. The Endless What Ifs: When OCD Hijacks Faith and Morality will be available for preorders later this fall.
This year, the virtual Faith & OCD Conference will be held on October 29 with a full lineup of 75 speakers, including clinicians, clergy, researchers and individuals with OCD. You can find all of the details at faithandocd.com/conference. Vanderbilt community members can receive 25% off registration with the code VANDERBILT.