Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Essays

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Essays Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Essay Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Essay I chose the topic of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder because it is an illness which has gone from relative obscurity to common knowledge in a very short amount of time. Fifteen years ago, OCD was not very well known to the average public, and then it caught the attention of Hollywood. The movie, As Good As It Gets, won Oscars for both the leading male and female actors and gave the public its first grand scale exposure to OCD. Next would be the show Monk, with the obsessive-compulsive detective whose illness also gifted him with amazing powers of observation and deduction. Yet, while these characters show the world the habits of a person with OCD, they often used them for laughs while the illness itself is far from funny. The first article I chose dealt with the ability to use cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in an intensive four-week program rather than with months of the patient working with a counselor. In this experiment, clients went to intense everyday sessions with the counselor where they worked on exposure to create endurance to trigger items. The result were very favorable, with the two patients cited having significant improvement from when they started the program. This research is wonderful in the fact it gives quicker relief for the client. People who enter this program are so entrapped by the illness they are struggling live a simple life. Rather than having to wait months for conventional CBT, they begin to find relief after a few sessions. I was surprised by the rapidity of the results. These patients were hard-core sufferers who had already tried medicine and failed. In four weeks, they went from being almost unable to function to having the ability to fight the illness and finally enjoy life. It is hard to believe but wonderful to know this therapy is out there for those caught in the cycle of OCD. Future studies should focus on creating a solid course of treatment any counselor could follow so this treatment is available to more people. The next article was about children with OCD and the importance of involving their parents in the therapy. While it was once believed OCD was rare in children, it is now known there are many child sufferers. The research showed a vast improvement when parents joined the therapy. After all, they were part of the illness as well, even if they didn’t know it. Parents often help or participate in completing the compulsive tasks and therefore feed into the illness. They also offer another point of view besides the patient’s about what the issues are and where the most trouble is found. While I thought it was great the parents would work to encourage the child, the child still had to do all the work. Of, course it was wonderful he had two cheerleaders to keep him on track, but it put all the real work on the shoulders of a little ten year old. I would think research should be done to create a program where the whole family shared some of the burden of helping to actively fight the disease. The third article was about an experiment that tested the belief that if therapy cut to the single belief of all the obsessions and compulsions of the sufferer and destroyed it, then the illness would be greatly relieved. Here the thearpist used cognitive therapy, (notice the lack of the behavioral part) to identify the single thought the client used to create his illness and convinced the patient it was false. This sounds so easy one wonders why it wasn’t thought up before. CBT has been a long standing therapy, but using pure cognitive therapy to break the back of the illness in a few easy sessions is both simple and radical. Much more research needs to be done to test to see if the results can be replicated and if it works with all OCD sufferers. References Detweiler, M. F. Albano, A,M. (2001). Covert symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in children: a case study. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, 15, 2, 75- 88. Guay, S, O’Connor, K. P. , Gareau, D. , Todorov, C. (2005). A single belief as a maintaining factor in a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, 19, 4, 369-380. Storch, E. A. , Gelfand, K. M. , Geffken, G. R. , Goodman, W. K. (2003). An intensive outpatient approach to the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder: case exemplars. Annuls of the American Psychotherapy Association, 6, 4. 14-34.