OCD and OCPD, What’s the Difference?

Living in a world where everything has to be “just right”, societies highly value self-discipline, attention to detail, control and perseverance. However, some people develop these traits to an extreme. They get too detail-oriented, too perfectionistic, subsequently ruminative and too inflexible, having a need to maintain strict control over people and events in their lives. Individuals exhibiting such traits are typically diagnosed with an “​Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)​”.

Building on previous research focusing on the symptoms related to the development of Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD), this article aims to develop a more thorough understanding of the symptoms of OCPD (not to be mistaken with OCD, “Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder”) and the factors associated with their development.

Description of OCPD

Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD) is a cluster C anxious-fearful personality disorder also referred to as “anankastic personality disorder” by the ICD-10, the European counterpart of the DSM-IV-TR.

According to the International OCD Foundation and the American Psychiatric Association, OCPD is characterized by a pervasive pattern of intransigent adherence to rules and regulations, excessive concern with orderliness, and reluctance to delegate responsibilities, at the cost of openness, flexibility and productivity.

Usually diagnosed in late adolescence or young adulthood, OCPD is one of the most prevalent personality disorders (Grant et al., 2004) and is estimated to occur in about 1 in 100 people in the United States and up to 26% in clinical samples (Ansell et al., 2010) depending on the definition used.

Distinction between OCPD and OCD

This disorder shares features with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and has a moderately high comorbidity with OCD. The latter only involves particular obsessive thoughts and/or compulsive behaviors, which are usually repetitive rituals irrelevant to real-life concerns and triggered in specific contexts, whereas OCPD involves a more general way of interacting with the world in which people fixate on techniques to perfectly accomplish daily tasks. Indeed, people with OCPD are perfectionists, a prominent rigid aspect of personality that is relatively constant across time and situations. Moreover, unlike people with OCD, those with OCPD do not have insight. They are not aware of their idealistic standards and strongly believe that their way is the “right and best way” and only feel content if everyone abides by their self-imposed rules.

Subsequently, their rigidity and excessive control typically extends to interpersonal relationships; people who come across them, such as their family members, co-workers, employers and “inferiors”, find them extremely difficult, highly bossy and demanding.

People with OCPD are unwilling to delegate tasks unless others do exactly as asked

While OCD might interfere in several aspects of a person’s life, OCPD usually impedes interpersonal relationships but sometimes increases the work functioning’s efficiency.

Symptoms of OCPD

People with OCPD usually adopt a goal-directed behavior, show excessive work devotion and see little need for social and family activities, at moments during which the long working hours are not justified by financial necessity. In fact, they have an utmost drive to efficiently accomplish tasks in an extremely careful and orderly manner. Subsequently, they are generally prone to being excessively fixated with lists and small details. Their desire for perfection and their rigid thinking overrides both their ability to complete a task and to get along with others.

While many people have some of the following characteristics, for a person to be diagnosed with OCPD, he/she has to meet the DMS-V criteria and must display at least four of the above-mentioned symptoms and they should be resulting in a significant impairment in social, work and/or family functioning over a long time duration.

OCPD is ego-syntonic whereas OCD is ego-dystonic

Typically, people with OCPD don’t believe they require treatment. They believe that if everyone else conformed to their strict rules, things would be fine! The threat of losing a job or a relationship due to interpersonal conflict may be the motivator for therapy. This is in contrast to people with OCD who feel tortured by their unwanted thoughts and rituals, and are more aware of the unreasonable demands that the symptoms place on others, often feeling guilty because of this. 


Family members of people with OCPD often feel extremely criticized and controlled by people with OCPD. Similar to living with someone with OCD, being ruled under OCPD demands can be very frustrating and upsetting, often leading to conflict. 


Risk factors associated with the development of OCPD

Although researchers remain unclear as to the exact causes of OCPD, OCPD appears to have numerous etiological theories and several risk factors (Hertler, 2014). Where Freud pointed to a firm parenting style during the anal-psychosexual stage, Erikson posited a failure in the psychosocial stage with a struggle between “autonomy versus shame” in the development of personality disorders such as OCPD, and social learning theorists shed the light on the maladaptive empathetic learning (Hertler, 2014). Indeed, since the early days, flawed parenting and childhood experiences have been at fault.

Although limited, some studies have shown how OCPD developed in response to environmental factors. While comparing healthy controls to psychiatric outpatients, Nordahl and Stiles (1997) reported that patients diagnosed with OCPD showed significantly less parental care and more overprotection, just like OCD-diagnosed patients (Lennertz et al., 2010; Yoshida et al., 2005). People with OCPD tend to have grown up in an environment characterized by harsh and rigid discipline, restricted expression of feelings, and no parental care or intimacy.

Along with a person’s childhood upbringing and environment, several risk factors have been demarcated by biological theories

Proponents of the heritability studies, Torgersen & colleagues (2000) conducted a twin study suggesting that the heritability rate is very high, being of 0.78.

Having a family history of OCPD or OCD appears to be a risk factor for developing OCPD (Torgersen et al., 2000; Taylor, Asmundson, & Jang, 2011). However, other research reveals that merely 27% of the variance can be explained by genetic factors (Reichborn-Kjennerud et al., 2007).

Moreover, there are some gender and cross-cultural risk factors. Actually, OCPD is twice as likely to occur in men as in women, a disproportion sometimes attributed to gender stereotyping. The latter is due to the fact that men appear to have greater permission from general ​Western civilization​ to act in dogged and domineering ways.

The coupled setting of the above-mentioned may trigger a complex biopsychosocial process that might eventually lead to the development of OCPD