This message comes from Nature on PBS, producers of Going Wild with Dr. Ray Wyn Grant.

Back for a brand new season, Going Wild highlights champions of nature and what led them to create change within themselves and the natural world.

Follow Going Wild wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Around 2% of the global population struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD.

That's roughly 163 million people who go through cycles of obsessions, these unwanted intrusive thoughts, images or urges, and compulsions,

behaviors to decrease the distress caused by these thoughts.

And Dr. Carolyn Rodriguez says the way it's often portrayed in pop culture, like the movie as good as it gets starring Jack Nicholson,

a character might do things like

very ritualized hand-washing.

Or you might see an individual who needs to have everything symmetrical.

Carolyn is a physician at Stanford University studying OCD.

She says these things can all be part of OCD, but they're often the only ways we see it

manifested in the media.

In reality, there's a lot more to it than symmetry and handwashing.

OCD is also called the doubting disease.

So, for example, an individual may be driving down the road

and all of a sudden have an intrusive thought that,

oh, maybe I ran somebody over.

And that thought, as you can imagine,

really increases anxiety to the point where

then the compulsions kick in. They have to

...