What do psychologists do to treat OCD?

These are the strategies and tools used in psychotherapy to combat OCD.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is one of the psychological disorders that most limit freedom and damage people's quality of life.

Fortunately, it is possible to manage its symptoms and learn behavioral patterns that will extinguish this disorder until it does not generate significant problems. If you are interested in knowing how psychologists work when it comes to treating OCD, keep on reading..

What is OCD and what are its symptoms?

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a psychological phenomenon described as a psychiatric syndrome in the diagnostic manuals used in Medicine and Clinical and Health Psychology. It is characterized by the loss of control before the appearance of intrusive thoughts and stereotypical actions that are very difficult to repress, and therefore it has elements in common with anxiety disorders and tics.

Typically, the elements that allow to identify the presence of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in the patients are two, as its name indicates: obsessions, on the one hand, and compulsions, on the other..

Obsessions are fundamentally intrusive images or thoughts, which arise in the person's consciousness "trapping" the person's attentional focus, and generating a strongly negative emotional response, linked to anxiety. These pieces of imagination can be, for example, the image of a large layer of germs invading our hands and eating them little by little, or a hole opening under our feet.

Compulsions are stereotyped actions that we feel the need to perform. to make the obsession go away (for the time being) and we feel relatively well again. These actions can be physical or mental. In addition, it is felt that these behaviors must be performed very carefully so that they "count" as closure of the obsession, and always in the same order; if not done well, it starts all over again. Examples of frequent compulsions are:

• Washing hands repeatedly and always in the same way.
• Cleaning a chair by passing a paper through certain places and in a certain order.
• Scratching certain parts of the body, following a systematized pattern.

Impact on daily life

As a consequence of the symptoms of OCD, people who suffer from it waste a lot of time every day using it to perform compulsions, compromise their physical and mental health due to their exposure to very mechanical routines and stress, and their social life is impaired. That is why, This is one of the usual reasons why many people come to Cribecca, our psychotherapy center in Seville.our psychotherapy center in Seville; it is part of the psychological disorders with which psychotherapists have a lot of experience.

On the other hand, in many cases the sufferer also has other psychological disorders that overlap with this one, since the fact of feeling bad makes us prone to generate additional problems that can become chronic.

What do psychologists do to treat OCD?

What can be done from the psychologist's office to treat and combat the symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?

One of the most effective strategies is called Exposure and Response Prevention.which consists of disassociating the anxiety experienced because of the obsession from the compulsive behavior. That is, the patient is trained to cope with this momentary discomfort, tolerating the experience without "surrendering" to the need to perform the compulsion.

In this way, the patient experiences how it is possible to endure the anxiety without anything bad happening beyond the anxiety itself, and begins to stop seeing the compulsion as an inevitable way out of the situation. As the treatment progresses under the supervision of the psychology professional in charge of the case, the obsession and the compulsion stop reinforcing each other, and this causes the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder to fade away.

On the other hand, it is also usually necessary to modify the irrational belief system of each patient. This is so because, on many occasions, the habit of submitting to compulsions can lead people to believe, totally or partially, that something very bad will happen to them. if they do not put an end to the obsession through a ritual (compulsion); this is an example of magical or superstitious thinking that reinforces the existence of the disorder and at the same time arises from it.

Thus, in psychotherapy sessions, cognitive restructuring is also carried out, focusing on the beliefs that feed and maintain the OCD. This consists of leading the patient to question these beliefs, to put them to the test and to see to what extent they are in line with reality.

Of course, everything we have seen about the treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is more complicated than what is summarized here. In reality it is a process that requires the joint work of the psychologist and the patient, and the realization of exercises between sessions by the latter (following the psychotherapist's instructions). El trabajo del psicólogo no es solo el de dar instrucciones, sino también el de “entrenar” literalmente a la persona a desprenderse del TOC poco a poco, mediante una transformación de los hábitos y de la manera de pensar.

Referencias bibliográficas:

• Kim, S.W.; Grant, J.E. (2001). Personality dimensions in pathological gambling disorder and obsessive–compulsive disorder. Psychiatry Research 104(3).
• Miller, C.H.; Dawson W.H. (2008). Scrupulosity disorder: An overview and introductory analysis. Journal of Anxiety Disorders 22 (6): pp. 1042 - 1058.
• Subramaniam, M; Soh, P.; Vaingankar, J.A.; Picco, L.; Chong, S.A. (2013). Quality of life in obsessive-compulsive disorder: impact of the disorder and of treatment. CNS Drugs. 27 (5): pp. 367 - 383.
• Whiteside, S.P.; Port, J.D.; Abramowitz, J.S. (2004). A meta–analysis of functional neuroimaging in obsessive–compulsive disorder. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging. 132 (1): pp. 69 - 79.