The Rare Mental Health Condition Luke Combs Was Diagnosed With

At just 12 years old, country music star Luke Combs was diagnosed with a rare form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it wasn't until a March 2025 interview with "60 Minutes Australia" that Combs shared more details about it. As he recounted his experience, the singer-songwriter peeled back the misconceptions related to OCD. While it has become almost glamorized as an incredibly sophisticated and polished way of living, in its actual form, the disorder can be debilitating, as Combs revealed. 

The disorder, as explained by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, is categorized by unwanted thoughts or urges that cause distress. The obsessions can vary, but the result is the same, adding unwanted stress on the individual living with OCD. The mental health condition has several forms; Combs was diagnosed with the purely obsessional type of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Typically referred to as Pure O OCD, it is under the larger umbrella of OCD that was labeled due to its lack of physical manifestation of compulsion. (These are the signs of OCD you may not be aware of.)

Where other cases of OCD can result in patterned behaviors, Pure O operates solely in the individual's mind. Combs explained it best, saying, "The variant that I have is particularly wicked because, you know, there's no outward manifestation of it. So for someone like myself, you don't even know it's going on. It could be going on right now."

If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.

During his interview, the country music star admitted that his OCD flare-ups, especially when they happen near his tour dates, felt impassable and paralyzing. Combs' flare-ups cause a wave of intrusive, uncontrollable thoughts on violence and religion to fill his head. "It focuses on things that don't have an answer," he explained. "It's really questions about who you are as a person that you really can't ever get an answer to."

For those without mental health conditions, flare-ups or episodes can be difficult to understand, especially in Combs' case. Without the physicality of other forms of the condition, Combs' experiences with his disorder look relatively calm from the outside. But inside his mind is a whole other scene. A spiral of cause and effect, Combs described his OCD as an ouroboros of his obsessive thoughts that brings about stress, which only encourages his brain to focus more on his OCD thoughts. 

The worst part: Combs cannot always define what causes his thoughts to send him into this spiral. As the obsessions fill his head and consume his time, the country music singer is left lost as to how to stop his obsessive thinking and even how they started. 

Though there isn't necessarily a singular cause of OCD, there are many studied cases that show a pattern of trauma as a source of the mental health condition, whereas other studies prove a chemical imbalance as the workings behind its development. Luke Norman, PhD, conducted a study on how OCD works inside the brain at the University of Michigan. "These results show that, in OCD, the brain responds too much to errors, and too little to stop signals, abnormalities that researchers had suspected to play a crucial role in OCD, but that had not been conclusively shown due to small numbers of participants in the individual studies," he noted of his findings.

As researchers continue to study the mental health condition, coping methods have been developed to better support individuals living with OCD. Journaling obsessive thoughts can work to combat the pattern of intrusive thinking. Other methods suggest separating OCD thoughts from original thoughts to reduce and deter obsessive thinking. Redirection and distraction are also strongly encouraged; humming a song or doing exercise may also help with OCD symptoms.