Category: OCD

OCD affects around 2 percent of people at some point in their lives.

Adaptive coping skills are the best way for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder to reduce symptoms, research finds.

Typical adaptive coping skills include problem-solving and acceptance.

People who cope adaptively tend to seek support from others, eat properly, exercise regularly and anticipate stressful episodes.

Unfortunately, people with OCD tend to use worse strategies to deal with anxiety, such as rumination, thought suppression and compulsive behaviours.

The motivations for obsessions in OCD are often highly rational.

People fear harm coming to themselves or their loved ones, so perform rituals they believe will reduce the risk.

Checking behaviours are the classic example.

However, accepting worry and intrusive thoughts is a more adaptive response to worry than obsessive checking.

The conclusions come from a study including 1,220 people, some of whom had OCD, others depression and the remainder unaffected by either.

All reported how they would cope with different situations.

The results showed that people with OCD had the fewest functional skills to help them adapt and cope.

Professor Steffen Moritz, the study’s first author, explained:

“Patients with OCD are characterized by both more maladaptive coping and less adaptive coping relative to controls.

Coping skills are important for many aspects of daily life beyond mental health.

Teaching children skills such as how to cope with bullying at school, poor performance or problems with their parents, for example, in the framework of general cognitive preventative treatment and resilience training in school, may help children to better deal with emotional turmoil and challenging situations during adolescence.

It may also prevent the progression of a vulnerability to later obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression as well as other disorders.”

The sign that someone has OCD is that their behaviours are driven by fear or intrusive thoughts that they are trying to get rid of.

People with OCD normally have unreasonable fears (called obsessions) which they try to reduce by performing certain behaviours (called compulsions).

OCD is thought to affect around 2.3 percent of people at some point in their lives.

Most people develop symptoms before they are twenty-years-old.

The study was published in the journal Cognitive Therapy and Research (Moritz et al., 2018).

There are 7 types of OCD you should know.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is often mixed up with having an obsessive personality.

People with obsessive personalities may, for example, like to have their books arranged alphabetically, without having OCD.

The sign that someone really has OCD is that their behaviours are driven by fear or intrusive thoughts that they are trying to get rid of.

OCD is most definitely not something sufferers derive any pleasure or satisfaction from.

Dr Elizabeth McIngvale, who is at Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the Baylor College of Medicine, explained:

“Obsessive compulsive personality disorder, in my opinion, is often what society thinks OCD is.

People with OCPD might organize their closet perfectly, have all of their items color-coded and organized by type or category, or if you open their fridge all of their labels are lined up perfectly and everything has a place.

However, individuals with OCPD often talk about the fact that there’s not an unwanted, intrusive thought and there’s no fear attached to these behaviors.

They just organize things a certain way or do these kind of compulsive behaviors because it makes them feel better.

However, with OCD, it is something that individuals don’t enjoy – there’s nothing they like about it, they are doing it because they feel like they have to in order to get rid of the intrusive thought or fear.

It is debilitating and draining and not something that makes the individual feel better and more productive when they are done.”

So, when people say “I’m a little OCD”, technically they should be saying: “I’m a little OCPD”.

Dr McIngvale continues:

“OCD is characterized by having compulsions and obsessions that are caused by unwanted, intrusive thoughts.

Individuals don’t want these thoughts, and it causes anxiety and they engage in repetitive rituals, which don’t bring them any joy or pleasure.

It’s something that they do because they feel like they have to in order to get rid of that thought.”

Some of the different types of OCD include contamination OCD, scrupulosity OCD, checking OCD, symptomatic OCD, perfectionism OCD, sexual intrusive thoughts and harming intrusive thoughts.

All are driven by fears (for example, of dirt or breaking a moral code) or intrusive thoughts (such as that they might suddenly commit a violent act).

Dr McIngvale concluded:

“Unfortunately, OCD is one of the disorders that takes, on average, about 25 years for people to get a diagnosis and proper treatment, but I really want to make sure that everybody with OCD knows that there is hope and there is help available.”

→ Read on: How to change your personality

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Study of OCD finds this indispensable system could be the key to multiple psychological problems.

An over-active habit system may be at the root of many psychological problems involving repetitive behaviours like OCD, alcoholism and binge eating, new research suggests.

The neuroimaging study, which is published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, found that people with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) had difficulty controlling their habits (Gillan et al., 2014).

Before this OCD was seen as a disorder in which repetitive behaviours were self-comforting responses to anxiety.

Dr Claire Gillan, the study’s first author, explained that the ramifications spread beyond OCD:

“It’s not just OCD; there are a range of human behaviours that are now considered examples of compulsivity, including drug and alcohol abuse and binge-eating.

What all these behaviours have in common is the loss of top-down control, perhaps due to miscommunication between regions that control our habit and those such as the prefrontal cortex that normally help control volitional behaviour.

As compulsive behaviours become more ingrained over time, our intentions play less and less of a role in what we actually do.”

In the research, 37 patients with OCD learned to press a pedal to avoid being given a mild electric shock.

In comparison to 33 healthy controls, those with OCD found it more difficult to stop pressing the pedal, even when there was no danger of receiving an electric shock.

Brain imaging revealed that in people with OCD the caudate nucleus region of the brain was over-active.

The caudate nucleus, which sits in the centre of the brain, plays a vital role in helping us control our habits.

Professor Trevor Robbins, who co-led the study, said:

“While some habits can make our life easier, like automating the act of preparing your morning coffee, others go too far and can take control of our lives in a much more insidious way, shaping our preferences, beliefs, and in the case of OCD, even our fears.

Such conditions – where maladaptive, repetitive habits dominate our behaviour – are among the most difficult to treat, whether by cognitive behaviour therapy or by drugs.”

• Read on: Making Habits, Breaking Habits: How to Make Changes that Stick

Image credit: David Goehring