Statistics point to an average of four doctors or specialists visited over a nine-year period for individuals who eventually received the diagnosis of OCD. Because this average reflects the recent past when OCD expertise was less common in the medical community than it is now, it is likely that this rate of misdiagnosis will fall rapidly in the years to come. However, there are still many reports from parents whose children have received erroneous diagnoses of bipolar disorder or who were told their child's problem was strictly behavioral, thus fixable by a different parenting style. Another common occurrence is a mistaken diagnostic emphasis on another disorder within the OCD spectrum (such as ADHD or social anxiety), which is not your child's primary presenting condition. This mistaken emphasis on a lesser problem can thwart treatment because the debilitating symptoms of OCD usually need to be brought under control before other treatment progress can be made.

Because diagnostic inaccuracy is so common in the mental health field, it behooves you as a health-care consumer acting on your child's behalf to be as vocal and persistent as you can in obtaining both an accurate formal diagnosis from the most qualified professional you can find and the best treatment for your child's OCD. For example, if your doctor states her preference for a type of therapy (other than CBT or its offshoot, Exposure Response Prevention, ERP) that is not usually recommended for OCD, you can press her for names and dates of studies to back up this recommendation. The results of the latest research studies are frequently available online on the Web sites of NIMH and other public sources for medical information listed in Appendix B.

Given the high level of comorbidity of OCD with other anxiety disorders and the similarity between symptoms associated with OCD and other disorders including autism and depression, a second opinion for your child may well be in order. The need to obtain another diagnosis to confirm or dispute the one you've already obtained should always be weighed against the emotional and physical toll that another round of testing will take on your child.