Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Today I'm talking about obsessive-compulsive disorder 

and how we treat it, and what are the symptoms . Obsessive compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder .

People who treat OCD know that you can have either or, b

ut I think people believe that the compulsions are their normal OCD because that part is observable. Often times people with OCD will have dysfunctional beliefs. You may put too much importance on a belief as if having the belief makes it a fact. in your head it can be as if you did it yourself.

People with OCD could have poor insight 

into how realistic their thoughts really are.For example  this would be to actually believe that if you do not turn your faucet on and off 20 times, the water will leak out and flood your home. If you ask any person how can that really happen, they can't give you an answer. They may say, I don't know, I just I believe it and I can't make myself not think that. In this scenario, you if can't be convinced that outcome is not possible, your belief would be considered a delusional belief.

But you would not consider to have a psychotic illness. 

In this case your diagnosis would be obsessive-compulsive disorder with delusional beliefs.

The term delusional beliefs would be 

considered a course specifier.

There are some common obsessional themes with OCD.

Contamination obsessions 

with or without cleaning compulsions.

Symmetry obsessions. 

This may come along with repeating, ordering, and counting compulsions.

Forbidden &  taboo thoughts. 

 this is where you can get aggressive, sexual, or religious obsessions.

 Harm obsessions. this can be fears of harm to yourself or someone else.

Sometimes  

Some people respond to the harm obsessions by checking or hoarding. 

Compulsions are repetitive behaviors that you're drawn to do 

because of an obsession or belief or a set of rules that you feel like you have to follow. For  example this would be needing to open and close your car door five times before you can get in ,The compulsions are hard to resist performing and they typically give you a lot of anxiety if you don't follow all the steps. And for the diagnosis of OCD the compulsions or obsessions need to be time-consuming, taking more than an hour per day and if you're someone who tends to check your locked your door twice before you leave the house every morning, that is compulsive, but it's not a disorder.

There's a certain amount of normal Compulsivity 

and Obsessionality that anyone can have. The compulsions, you can recognize that it's something unreasonable but you have to do it to relieve your anxiety. You need to check to make sure you turned off the oven before you can leave your home, and You go back in the house and check to see if it's off and then you go back to your car. But if you have the urge to check one more time. So, you say to yourself you know it's off, but you just can't feel satisfied and you check that one more time. If you try and force yourself not to check you can leave with a lot of distress and discomfort ,  you may even question whether you really turned it off. It's like your memory of checking it changes and now you're not sure sitting at work  and you've got a lot of distress about it.

Obsessions on the other hand can be something 

that become hard to talk yourself down from , an example  you fear getting HIV infection. Intellectually you know that you get it from human fluid exchange. You can't get from touching a doorknob, or shaking someone's hand now you have HIV.

The gold standard therapy for treatment for OCD is called 

cognitive behavior therapy with exposure and response prevention. This treatment can also help you if you only have the obsessions or what people would call the Pure O OCD because you  have developed some avoiding behaviors,  and these avoiding behaviors could be the focus of your treatment. Instead of having an obsession and a performing a compulsion, you have things that you don't do anymore because you know they'll trigger your thoughts. and you may be losing out on things because of the fact that you're now avoiding certain activities.

If  you fear being contaminated 

by touching things that disgust you. Here is your list of exposure situations might look like going from low to high. Touching a doorknob,  and then being unable to wash your hand for 10 minutes. These things might seem like extreme circumstances that you probably wouldn't want to do even if you didn't have OCD. But when you don't have OCD, you're not consumed with thinking about things like this.

But these are the kinds of thoughts that people 

with OCD can spend their time thinking or worrying about. The  response prevention immerses you into more extreme forms of your fear situation to desensitize you from the things that you actually fear. The goal of the treatment is to not only be able to stop the behavior but to see that you can master your anxiety and it doesn't have to consume you.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Thank You ❤