Estimates & Implications of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD) Prevalence: OCPD as a Common Disorder with a Cosmopolitan Distribution or Rare Strategy with a Northerly Distribution?

DSM-V estimates the prevalence of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD) to fall between 2.1 and 7.9 percent, making it one of the most prevalent personality disorders in the general population. Yet, obsessive prevalence is reported without its significance being appreciated. After reviewing the estimates of several studies, this paper pursues the theme of obsessive prevalence, showing why it was ignored, how it changes etiological assumptions, and, in turn, how newly generated etiologies engender the understanding of obsessive prevalence. High prevalence, when paired with high heritability, undermines psychoanalytic etiologies and invalidates psychiatric classification, suggesting that OCPD is a rare type, rather than a common disorder. Following this, evolutionary theory is used to illustrate the conditions from which this rare phenotype arose, and the mechanistic laws that maintain it within its present proportions. As treated within the discussion section, high prevalence, when contextualized within an evolutionary explanatory paradigm, suggests an ecologically determined biogeography of OCPD.