Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS)
Rate and score the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS), the standard measure of OCD severity. Ten items across obsessions and compulsions, shown in full, with an AI prompt to score de-identified responses.
What it measures
The Y-BOCS, developed by Goodman and colleagues in 1989, is the gold-standard clinician-rated measure of obsessive-compulsive symptom severity. This is the 10-item severity scale: five items for obsessions and five for compulsions, each rated 0 to 4 for time, interference, distress, resistance and control.
It is usually completed after the Y-BOCS symptom checklist has identified the client's obsessions and compulsions. It rates severity independently of the content of the symptoms, which makes it well suited to tracking change during treatment.
Getting the Y-BOCS
The Y-BOCS is widely used but is not public domain, and permission to reproduce it is not clearly granted. Because ElloMind is a commercial organisation and holds no licence, we describe the instrument rather than reproduce it.
Request the Y-BOCS on ePROVIDE (Mapi Research Trust)
Rights held by Wayne K. Goodman and colleagues; distributed by Mapi Research Trust. The guidance below describes how the Y-BOCS is administered and interpreted so you can use your licensed copy well.
Scoring and interpretation
For each of the ten items, rate severity 0 (none) to 4 (extreme) from the clinical interview, over the past week. The scorer sums obsession and compulsion items into a 0 to 40 total.
A common severity banding: 0 to 7 subclinical, 8 to 15 mild, 16 to 23 moderate, 24 to 31 severe, and 32 to 40 extreme. Use the total to track response to treatment; a fall of 25 to 35 percent is often taken as a meaningful improvement.
| Score | Interpretation |
|---|---|
| 0–7 | Subclinical |
| 8–15 | Mild |
| 16–23 | Moderate |
| 24–31 | Severe |
| 32–40 | Extreme |
Clinician-rated, over the past week. For items 4 and 9, higher scores mean less resistance. Use with the Y-BOCS symptom checklist.
Use the score in your notes
Take the score into a de-identified write-up with one of the free AI tools.
Citation and sources
Goodman, W.K., et al. (1989). The Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale. Archives of General Psychiatry, 46(11), 1006-1016.
The Y-BOCS is copyrighted by its authors and is distributed under licence through Mapi Research Trust. Being widely used in research and practice is not the same as being free to reproduce, and its permission status for third-party reproduction is not clear. ElloMind has no licence to reproduce it, so the items are not shown here.
- Y-BOCS (overview) — Wikipedia
Frequently asked questions
The severity of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, independent of their content. The 10-item severity scale rates time, interference, distress, resistance and control for both obsessions and compulsions, for a total from 0 to 40.
By a common convention, 16 to 23 is moderate, 8 to 15 mild, 24 to 31 severe and 32 to 40 extreme, with 0 to 7 subclinical.
No. It is clinician-rated, usually after the Y-BOCS symptom checklist has mapped the client's specific obsessions and compulsions.
No. The prompt runs in your own AI assistant, and ElloMind never sees it. De-identify client information first.
A screening and rating aid for qualified professionals, not a diagnosis or a substitute for clinical judgement. Interpret every score within a full assessment. Never paste identifiable client data into a general AI assistant. If a client is in crisis, contact a crisis helpline right away.