For many sufferers, the condition was both agonizing and isolating, something to be hidden from friends and family. The fact that it could be treated through behavioral therapy and medication, or that it even had a name at all, was little known to the public until 1989, when Judith L. Rapoport, the head of child psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health, published “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing,” a best-selling book that helped bring wide attention to OCD.