Are Grandma's homemade chocolate chip cookies giving you a conniption fit? You might have OCD.Alcohol OCD: Conquering Fears of Accidental Ingestion & Contamination with ERP Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) has long been dubbed the "doubting disease" for its...
Feeling gaslighted by OCD? Defeat OCD-related doubt through exposure and response prevention (ERP), not logic!One of OCD's most diabolical tricks is its ability to sow seeds of doubt, even about beliefs we hold strongly. Think of it as a tiny, annoying heckler in your...
Let's talk about the elephant in the room (or the bedroom... or the laundry basket...). OCD loves taboo topics, and as such, it can easily infiltrate topics related to semen, sperm, vaginal secretions, and other various sexual fluids...Alright, let's dive into the...
What: OCD Scriptathon 2017, A Group Scripting Experience Where: Our office! Located at 11380 Prosperity Farms Road, Ste 209A, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida 33410 When: Tuesday, April 11, 2017 from 8:00 PM - Until It Ends If you've ever practiced imaginal exposure,...
These are difficult times. Lately, it seems, each week brings with it something truly horrifying. A shooting or an act of terrorism, a hate crime committed against an individual, a disease that affects the unborn. You can hardly turn on the news without hearing about...
In previous posts, I have discussed various aspects of the "OCD Cycle," but it never hurts to have a quick refresher. After all, understanding how OCD works can help you see through its lies and help mobilize you to stand up and challenge it. What is OCD, and how does...
People new to OCD treatment often walk through the door with more than a few misconceptions. Here are some common ones: Misconception 1: Anxiety is bad. Actually, anxiety is a normal, functional, biologically-based phenomenon that every person is capable of...
Welcome to #OCDWEEK 2016, a week organized by IOCDF to help raise awareness about OCD and related conditions! If you visit IOCDF’s website, you’ll find information about local and online programs and events designed to help increase the general public’s understanding...
Group Therapy for OCD Wow. Our first OCD treatment group met yesterday, and IMHO, it was an incredible experience. Thank you to all who attended and showed such courage in standing up to their OCD. I was reminded anew how group therapy for OCD is so different than...
OCD is a malevolent advisor that wants to deceive us about the fundamental nature of the world. It wants us to believe that the world shouldn't have any sharp edges and that our experience should be as smooth and snag-free as possible. If snags are apparent, it tells...
It's nearly Halloween, and kids around the country are digging through dusty closets and plundering the aisles of local Halloween shops in search of the perfect costume. Halloween is the one night of the year when we give ourselves permission to be silly, scary, or...
The International OCD Foundation (IOCDF) is sponsoring OCD Awareness Week, which means that organizations around the world are hosting special OCD-related events this week. South Floridians, we invite you to join us for our monthly support group meeting tonight...
This is a recommended list of OCD books and OCD websites that I consider to be essential reading for individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In addition to my formal training in OCD treatment, these OCD books and websites have had a profound impact on how I...
Anxiety, Worry, & What If Questions If you have anxiety, it's likely that you wrestle with worry and "what if" questions. Many what if questions are easily recognizable and start with the obvious, "What if...?" Others are more subtle and begin with phrases like...
In my post about the treatment of sensorimotor OCD, a reader asked about the ultimate goal of treatment. Should the goal of treatment be to never notice an unwanted thought or symptom? Suppressing Unwanted Thoughts & Sensations in Pure-O & Sensorimotor OCD...
OCD & Thought Control Can I learn to eliminate my OCD thoughts? I hear this question all the time from new patients who are searching for ways to suppress their unwanted thoughts. When I answer this question with a resounding "no", there is often much surprise and...
Although contamination OCD and washing rituals often go hand-in-hand, many rituals in this domain do not actually involve cleaning or disinfecting. These more subtle rituals are often based around reassurance seeking behaviors that become ingrained in everyday habit....
In my last post, I identified several idiosyncratic feared outcomes in OCD that are associated with contamination/health-related obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Obsessions are intrusive, recurrent, and distressing thoughts, impulses, or images related to these...
Does OCD affect decision making processes? Now that we have reviewed the neurobiology of OCD and cognitive deficits associated with OCD, what relevance might this have for predicting abnormalities on tasks of decision making? Sachdev and Malhi (2005) recently have...
What cognitive deficits are associated with OCD? Research has been successful in characterizing the underlying neurobiology of OCD, and cognitive abnormalities associated with the disorder have been documented within the domains of basic learning processes, attention,...
What causes OCD? Researchers have had much recent success in elucidating the neural circuitry involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Advances in functional neuroimaging have identified robust alterations in neural activity within particular functional...
What is OCD? Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a debilitating mental illness that affects nearly 2.5% of the population (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). The primary features of the disorder include obsessions, which are recurrent and persistent...
Many excellent parents struggle with how to appropriately parent their child/teen with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Unfortunately, this process is rarely straightforward and is often counter-intuitive, which leaves many parents feeling anxious and confused. As...
Here's a question for you: Is exposure and response prevention (ERP) fundamentally a destructive or constructive process? I think that many people naturally conceptualize it as more of the former than the latter. They conceive of ERP as being the process by which we...
Psychiatrists and psychologists continue to debate the fundamental nature of OCD, trying to decide whether or not OCD should continue to be classified as an "anxiety disorder." In some ways, OCD overlaps with other anxiety-related conditions, such as panic disorder,...
OCD isn't just about anxiety. Although anxiety is certainly a prominent feature of the disorder, clinicians who only attend to anxious symptoms can easily overlook some of its other core features. As a psychologist in Palm Beach, Florida, I work closely with kids,...
Many individuals with OCD hunger for certainty. It's a craving that often can't be easily sated. Early conceptions of OCD from the 19th century acknowledged this issue directly, in that OCD was often termed the "doubting disease." It is this need for certainty, the...
Symptoms of OCD are everywhere. Turn on your television, and you're likely to catch at least a fleeting glimpse of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Many popular TV shows feature characters with OCD (e.g., Emma on Glee, Monk), and it is through this lens that many...
