A woman wrongly believed that she was a paedophile before a diagnosis revealed that she was suffering with a debilitating condition.Molly Lambert, 22, began to experience violent and sexual intrusive thoughts when she was 15 years old.The thoughts became so intense that Molly was terrified that she was a danger to other people, and became wrongly convinced that she was a paedophile.Misunderstanding about intrusive thoughts has circulated widely on the internet in recent years, but the reality is that intrusive thoughts can be extremely distressing and debilitating to people who experience them.

While one person might imagine an ‘intrusive thought’ as something like swearing at a co-worker, for some people they can be extremely dark.Molly, from Manchester in the UK, initially believed this meant she was a danger to people, but then found out that she was actually suffering with a specific kind of mental health condition.This is paedophile obsessive compulsive disorder, or P-OCD, where someone experiences unwanted intrusive thoughts about the sexual abuse of children.P-OCD is not paedophilia, and left Molly distraught.“I thought OCD was cleaning and tidying, that wasn’t me at all,” she said. “The more controlling forms of OCD like mine are the ones we don’t talk about.”It’s entirely normal to experience intrusive thoughts, and people without OCD are mostly able to recognise them as such and brush them off.But someone who has OCD might experience them more intensely and find them impossible to ignore, leading them to believe that the intrusive thoughts are true.