Digital OCD: The Untheorised Ritual

We are only beginning to understand what the digital space is doing to the structure of obsessive-compulsive experience in adolescents. Clinically, we see it all the time. The fifteen-year-old who scrolls Reddit threads looking for moral confirmation. The seventeen-year-old who replays TikTok videos to check whether a reaction was normal. The fourteen-year-old who checks and re-checks WhatsApp messages for signs of betrayal. These behaviours are often mislabelled as screen time issues or digital hygiene problems. But in truth, many of these rituals are structurally obsessive, and urgently in need of symbolic understanding.

It is time we took seriously the idea that the digital world has become the new arena for compulsive repetition, doubt, control, and symbolic defence. Not because of the content. Because of the structure.

When a young person with OCD begins scrolling forums in search of certainty, around their sexual orientation, moral standing, or relationship behaviour, they often describe it in exactly the same terms as a classic compulsion. I just want to be sure. Once I start, I cannot stop. I know it does not help, but I feel like I have to. What if I miss something important? The structure is unmistakable. Just like hand-washing, door-checking, or mental reassurance loops, these digital rituals are driven by intolerable uncertainty, a need to prevent psychic catastrophe, and the temporary relief provided by the act of checking. Yet because the action involves a screen and not soap, we too often file it under screen addiction or poor emotional regulation. We fail to ask what psychic function this digital space is actually serving.

This is not a rhetorical question. In our work with obsessional adolescents, we must ask what the feed is replacing, what is being checked for symbolically, and what position the young person is holding themselves in relation to the screen.

One possible answer is that the feed becomes a kind of infinite superego. There is always more to see. Always one more opinion, one more example, one more possible contradiction. The adolescent is not merely looking for comfort. They are trying to make moral sense of themselves in a space that never stops moving. The digital scroll functions like a psychic tribunal. The adolescent re-submits their internal question to the court of anonymous others, over and over. Was that wrong? Am I normal? Is this okay? And like the obsessive mind itself, the feed never gives a definitive answer. It only multiplies the possibilities.

Another way of thinking about this draws on Klein and later André Green: the fantasy of inexhaustible nourishment, the unweaned breast. For some obsessive adolescents, the feed functions as an infinite breast, endlessly giving, never saturating. This is not simply a source of comfort but of profound ambivalence. The adolescent returns again and again seeking certainty or containment, but the very act of returning deepens the dependence. Scrolling, like compulsive cleaning or confession, becomes a form of psychic suckling, an attempt to fill the gap that can never be fulfilled. The adolescent is not simply being soothed by the feed. They are submitting to it, offering their question to a maternal object that does not metabolise it. And this failed metabolisation only intensifies the need to return.

Digital compulsions often present with a veneer of autonomy. The young person appears to be choosing their content, following interests, learning about the world. But underneath this apparent agency is something far more rigid, a ritual structure driven by fear, guilt, and moral confusion. The adolescent is not curious in the epistemophilic sense. They are searching, often compulsively, for something that will let them off the hook. The fantasy is that one day they will find the definitive post, the perfect thread, the final message that will make them feel okay. But this is the fantasy of the obsessional structure: that closure is possible.

What often happens in therapy is that we address the content. We ask what the adolescent is watching, or offer behavioural strategies for reducing screen time. But unless we understand the symbolic function of the digital ritual, our interventions remain flat. Instead we might ask what they are hoping to find when they check, what it feels like when they do not check, whether it is harder to stop or harder to start, and what it would mean if they were never certain. More importantly, we must begin to tolerate the affect that lies underneath the digital compulsion, often a mix of dread, longing, and moral fear. The adolescent needs us not just to limit the screen but to name the terror that drives them towards it.

We are not talking here about digital minimalism or healthy tech use. We are talking about a generation of adolescents whose symbolic rituals are being enacted inside digital architectures, scrolling, searching, watching, re-checking, all with the same structural qualities Freud observed in his early cases. And we are not yet theorising it. This is our task: to develop a symbolic and structural understanding of digital rituals, and to reflect that understanding back in the consulting room. Because if we continue to treat digital OCD as screen overuse, we risk missing the heart of the matter entirely. A young person’s attempt to survive unbearable psychic tension, one click at a time.