A lot of your every day, regular type people have OCD. But, of course, OCD fails to discriminate. It seemed to have been after those who weren’t so regular, too. Sadly, most of these people that came up on Google seemed to not have genuine OCD, and appeared to only have been playing along with the “quirky”, fake side of it.

(Please note that this is a list of people who were thought to have had OCD, or people who have actually been diagnosed. Some of these that haven’t been diagnosed are based on what the modern psychology community heavily thinks.)

Charles Darwin

That’s right, the famous evolutionist Charles Darwin is thought to have had awful OCD. Darwin had written about various obsessions that he had, and once wrote in a letter to a friend, “I could not sleep and whatever I did in the day haunted me at night with vivid and most wearing repetition”. He described his thoughts as a “horrid spectacle” with thoughts that included his children inheriting his illness. To try and stop them, Darwin kept “closing his eyes firmly” but they did not cease. He reported that the thoughts were much worse during the day than they were at night. Darwin also craved reassurance and found himself to be very ugly.

2. Howard Hughes

One of the richest people alive at the time, Howard Hughes was known for his success as a businessman, movie director, movie producer, and an aviator. However there was something very off about his life… and one of those things suspected was OCD. He had the same amount of obsessions as his successes. Hughes suffered from a more conventional type of OCD, revolving around germaphobia. The main character in the film The Aviator, based off of him, is a real life representation of OCD.

3. Lena Dunham

Professionally diagnosed, writer and actress Lena Dunham has recently opened up about her battle with OCD that she has been fighting ever since she was as young as 8 years old. “The list of things that keep me up at night includes but is not limited to: appendicitis, typhoid, leprosy, unclean meat, foods I haven’t seen emerge from their packaging, foods my mother hasn’t tasted first so that if we die we die together, homeless people, headaches, rape, kidnapping, milk, the subway, sleep”. That’s a lot to obsess over.

4. Jon Richardson

Another person who has been professionally diagnosed, Jon Richardson is a comedian with OCD. “OCD is a really serious condition – it’s a proper thing. It’s not just, ‘Oh, you like your pens to be straight’. For me, it would always go in tandem with being unhappy. The unhappier I was, the worse it got.”

“I remember a night when I was living in Swindon on my own, and I couldn’t sit on the couch because there were two cushions and I couldn’t sit equally between them.” This lead him to constantly standing up in his flat, never ever sitting down. Sounds tiring enough.

This list is actually quite short. Most of the results that came up seemed to be very fake. If you do however know of any celebrities that suffered from OCD, please let us know!