What Treatments Are Available For Obsessive
If you have symptoms of OCD that interfere with your daily life, you should talk to a healthcare provider. A professional who is specially trained in mental illness can offer several strategies:
- Cognitive-behavioral therapy : Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a type of psychotherapy. You will talk to a therapist, who will help you examine and understand your thoughts and emotions. Over several sessions, CBT can help you stop negative habits, perhaps replacing them with healthier ways to cope.
- Medications: Drugs called serotonin reuptake inhibitors , selective SRIs and tricyclic antidepressants may help. They increase levels of serotonin. Examples include clomipramine, fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, paroxetine and sertraline.
- Exposure and response prevention : With this therapy, you do the thing that causes anxiety. The healthcare provider then prevents you from responding with a compulsion. For example, the provider may ask you to touch dirty objects but then stop you from washing your hands.
What happens if CBT and medications dont work for OCD?If OCD doesnt respond to CBT and medication, a healthcare provider may try to improve mood, specifically depression, with these therapies:
Your provider might suggest using mindfulness to treat OCD and to improve the usefulness of other OCD treatments.
Statistics About Ocd And Anxiety Disorders
It is estimated that as many as 19.1% of adults in the United States have experienced symptoms of an anxiety disorder in the past year, while up to 31.1% of adults in the U.S. will experience these symptoms at some point in their lives. Women are more likely to have anxiety disorders than men.
Although women have a higher risk of developing an anxiety disorder overall, OCD occurs at roughly the same rate in both men and women. The rate of OCD in people of different races, backgrounds, and ethnicities is roughly the same as well.
This disorder can begin at any age. However, the first appearance of symptoms most often occurs between 8-12 years old or in late adolescence/early adulthood.
Estimates indicate that 1-2% of adults in the U.S. struggle with OCD. This translates to between two and three million people. Among kids and teens, OCD affects approximately one in 200 people. Around 500,000 kids and teenagers in the U.S. are currently struggling with OCD.
The World Health Organization names OCD as one of the top 20 causes of illness-based disability in the world among people between the ages of 15 and 44.
Co-occurring disorders with OCD are not rare. Among those diagnosed with OCD:
What Are Examples Of Compulsive Behaviors
Compulsions are actions someone takes in an attempt to get rid of obsessions or anxiety. Examples include:
- Arranging things in a very specific way, such as items on your dresser.
- Bathing, cleaning or washing hands over and over.
- Checking certain things repeatedly, such as a lock or the stove.
- Collecting or hoarding things that have no personal or financial value.
- Constantly checking that you havent done someone harm.
- Counting repeatedly or saying certain words or prayers while doing other tasks.
- Eating food in a specific order.
- Refusing to shake hands or touch objects that other people touch a lot, like doorknobs.
- Performing a task a specific number of times, such as always flipping a light switch seven times.
People with OCD may also have tics brief, sudden, repetitive movements or actions, like:
- Blinking their eyes.
- Sniffling their nose or clearing their throat.
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Coping Strategies To Reduce Stress And Ocd Symptoms
Working with a therapist to increase your coping skills and manage your OCD symptoms can substantially improve your quality of life.
Spikes in everyday stress levels tend to trigger more acute OCD symptoms. Learning to cope with, and thereby reduce your experience of stress, is an effective way to gain control over your OCD symptoms.
If you are experiencing stress and OCD, you do not have to deal with it alone or let yourself spin out of control even more. Help is available, and a better quality of life is attainable. Seek a therapist who has experience treating OCD and helping clients manage OCD and stress.
References
Cromer, K. R., Schmidt, N. B., & Murphy, D. L. . An investigation of traumatic life events and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Behaviour research and therapy, 45, 1683-1691.
Dhuri, C. V., & Parker, S. R. . Role of life events in the onset of obsessive compulsive disorder. Sri Lanka Journal of Psychiatry, 5, 10-13
Forsythe, C. J., & Compas, B. E. . Interaction of cognitive appraisals of stressful events and coping: Testing the goodness of fit hypothesis. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 11, 473-485.
Vidal-Ribas, P., Stringaris, A., Rück, C., Serlachius, E., Lichtenstein, P., & Mataix-Cols. D. . Are stressful life events causally related to the severity of obsessive-compulsive symptoms? A monozygotic twin difference study. European Psychiatry, 30, 309-316.
Obsess About Different Things
For one thing, people with OCD tend to obsess about very specific things, whereas people with anxiety may worry about a range of issues. For example, someone with OCD might be obsessed with the idea that their house is dirty and must be cleaned constantly. In contrast, someone with an anxiety disorder may worry about a variety of things, such as their job, family, or health.
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Specialized Ocd Therapy Can Help Treat The Cause Of Your Anxiety
OCD can lead to intense feelings of anxiety. This is especially true when the condition is left untreated. Many people with OCD get these anxious feelings mixed up with the root cause. Most in our community have found that working with an OCD therapist also addresses their anxiety and has brought them back to a better quality of life.
Its not uncommon for members of the OCD community to develop other physical and mental health conditions. This is often due to the reduced quality of life and high levels of social and occupational impairment that can come with untreated OCD. Anxiety, as well see in a moment, is an intrinsic part of the OCD cycle. The good news is that getting help for your OCD can help reduce anxiety.
Mindfulness And Erp For Health Anxiety Ocd
Exposure and Response Prevention , simply put, is a process where you confront your fears about your health and refrain from doing compulsions. People often think of mindfulness and ERP as two separate strategies when in fact mindfulness is often a part of ERP. While doing exposure to your fear you are mindfully allowing yourself to both approach and remain in the presence of your fear and mindfully choosing not to engage in compulsions. The purpose of this exercise is to essentially retrain your brain to respond to the obsessive thoughts without doing compulsions which ultimately teaches your brain that these thoughts are irrelevant and require no response.
Learning to respond differently to these thoughts ultimately results in accepting uncertainty about their meaning. This both reduces your anxiety about the thoughts and increases your willingness to feel whatever anxiety may remain.
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Do These Problems Overlap
It’s not uncommon for people with GAD to meet the criteria for another psychiatric diagnosis in the course of their lifetime, or even simultaneously. While the most commonly co-occurring problem is depression, a subset of people struggles with co-occurring GAD and OCD.
The treatments for GAD and OCD overlap as well. Many medications are helpful for both problems, as is the cognitive behavioral psychotherapy approach. However, for OCD, a focused type of cognitive behavioral treatment called exposure and response prevention has been shown to work best.
Symptoms Of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
If you have OCD, you’ll usually experience frequent obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours.
- An obsession is an unwanted and unpleasant thought, image or urge that repeatedly enters your mind, causing feelings of anxiety, disgust or unease.
- A compulsion is a repetitive behaviour or mental act that you feel you need to do to temporarily relieve the unpleasant feelings brought on by the obsessive thought.
For example, someone with an obsessive fear of being burgled may feel they need to check all the windows and doors are locked several times before they can leave their house.
Women can sometimes have OCD during pregnancy or after their baby is born. Obsessions may include worrying about harming the baby or not sterilising feeding bottles properly. Compulsions could be things such as repeatedly checking the baby is breathing.
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Are The Treatments Different
After diagnosis, you can get a treatment plan specific to your needs. Treatments for OCD and anxiety disorders can include one or a mix of the following:
- Psychotherapy, also called talk therapy, such as cognitive behavioral therapy .
- Medication to help reduce the symptoms. This might include anti-anxiety medications, such as beta-blockers and antidepressants. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors can also help treat OCD, often in higher doses than used for depression.
- Complementary health approaches, including relaxation techniques.
People with OCD and some types of anxiety disorder, such as specific phobias, can benefit from exposure and response prevention, a type of treatment for OCD.
OCD has similar traits to other conditions, which the DSM-5 has compiled within its OCD chapter. Other conditions OCD could be confused with are:
- hoarding disorder
- body focused repetitive disorder
- olfactory reference syndrome
Though there are similarities such as repetitive behaviors and obsessions, there are some critical differences like body-only focuses or positive feelings from the repetitive behavior, which arent present in OCD.
Anxiety disorders such as and agoraphobia can also be confused with OCD. Symptoms such as avoiding particular places or situations because of fear is common in all three conditions.
Can Anxiety Cause Ocd
Because OCD is essentially an extreme type of anxiety, anxiety can eventually lead to OCD. Just like anxiety, OCD thought patterns are cyclical, and without treatment, they may grow worse and spread to other members of the family. Not only can anxiety eventually lead to the development of OCD in an individual, one persons obsessive-compulsive behavior can influence other family members.
However, it is important to remember that the causes of OCD are too complex to attribute to a singular cause. What causes OCD is a complex combination of biological, genetic, learning, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Fortunately, when it comes to treating OCD, the most important factors are cognitive and behavioral, and healing underlying anxiety should be a critical component of care.
Are you or someone you care about struggling with acute anxiety or obsessive-compulsive thought patterns? Our team can help with both. OCD Treatment Options
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How Can I Tell If I Have Ocd Or An Anxiety Disorder
You can differentiate OCD from anxiety disorders by the presence of obsessions and compulsive behaviors. Both can cause a significant amount of distress and get in the way of important daily activities, such as working and going to school.
For example, if you have OCD, you may have a fear of contamination, so you wash your hands every time you touch something new. Or you may fear that someone might get harmed because you werent careful, so you count to a safe number when doing tasks.
These types of behaviors and thought patterns arent typically present in anxiety disorders.
A trained therapist can diagnose your condition correctly and prescribe the best treatment plan for you.
If you want to read more, you can check out this article in which mental health advocate Sam Dylan Finch talks about the differences between OCD and GAD.
Ocd And Depression Ocd And Anxiety Ocd And Adhd
OCD and anxiety, OCD and depression, and OCD and ADHD often run together. Did you know people with obsessive-compulsive disorder run a high risk of having comorbid illnesses, such as OCD and anxiety? Doctors typically check for comorbid disorders in OCD patients. It’s critical that they identify each problem to ensure the best possible treatment outcomes.
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Treatments For Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
There are some effective treatments for OCD that can help reduce the impact it has on your life.
The main treatments are:
- psychological therapy usually cognitive behavioural therapy , which helps you face your fears and obsessive thoughts without “putting them right” through compulsions
- medicine usually a type of antidepressant medicine called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors , which can help by altering the balance of chemicals in your brain
CBT will usually have an effect quite quickly. It can take several months before you notice the effects of treatment with SSRIs, but most people will eventually benefit.
If these treatments do not help, you may be offered an alternative SSRI or be given a combination of an SSRI and CBT.
Some people may be referred to a specialist mental health service for further treatment.
Using Your Fear Ladder
Work your way up the ladder. Start with the first step and dont move on until you start to feel more comfortable doing it. If possible, stay in the situation long enough for your anxiety to decrease. The longer you expose yourself to your OCD trigger, the more youll get used to it and the less anxious youll feel when you face it the next time. Once youve done a step on several separate occasions without feeling too much anxiety, you can move on to the next step. If a step is too hard, break it down into smaller steps or go slower.
As youre resisting your compulsions, focus on the feelings of anxiety. Instead of trying to distract yourself, allow yourself to feel anxious as you resist the urge to engage in your compulsive behavior. You may believe that the discomfort youre feeling will continue until you engage in the compulsion. But if you stick with it, the anxiety will fade. And youll realize that youre not going to lose control or have some kind of breakdown if you dont perform the ritual.
Practice. The more often you practice, the quicker your progress will be. But dont rush. Go at a pace that you can manage without feeling overwhelmed. And remember: you will feel uncomfortable and anxious as you face your fears, but the feelings are only temporary. Each time you expose yourself to your trigger, your anxiety should lessen and youll start to realize that you have more control than you thought.
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If You Think That Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Only Involves Excessive Handwashing Think Again
We all experience anxiety, a feeling of dread that happens to be your bodys natural response to stress. It may be brought on by a variety of circumstances, including making an important decision, an upcoming test, or meeting someone new.
If someone is living with an anxiety disorder like OCD, these feelings dont go away and often develop into symptoms that, if untreated, can interfere with relationships, job performance, schoolwork, and even basic functioning.
Thankfully an OCD diagnosis doesnt have to limit someones potential. Many people successfully manage their OCD and live normal, successful lives.
If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with OCD, there is hope.