Professional Documents
Culture Documents
OCD isn’t about habits like biting your nails or thinking negative thoughts. An obsessive thought might be that certain
numbers or colors are “good” or “bad.” A compulsive habit might be to wash your hands seven times after touching
something that could be dirty. Although you may not want to think or do these things, you feel powerless to stop.
Everyone has habits or thoughts that repeat sometimes. People with OCD have thoughts or actions that:
Aren’t enjoyable
Interfere with work, your social life, or another part of life
OCD comes in many forms, but most cases fall into at least one of four general categories:
Checking, such as locks, alarm systems, ovens, or light switches, or thinking you have a medical condition like
pregnancy or schizophrenia
Contamination, a fear of things that might be dirty or a compulsion to clean. Mental contamination involves feeling
like you’ve been treated like dirt.
Symmetry and ordering, the need to have things lined up in a certain way
Ruminations and intrusive thoughts, an obsession with a line of thought. Some of these thoughts might be violent or
disturbing.
Many people who have OCD know that their thoughts and habits don’t make sense. They don’t do them because they enjoy
them, but because they can’t quit. And if they stop, they feel so bad that they start again.
Doing tasks in a specific order every time or a certain “good” number of times
It’s a bit more common in women than in men. Symptoms often appear in teens or young adults.
Sometimes, a child might have OCD after a streptococcal infection. This is called pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric
disorders associated with streptococcal infections, or PANDAS.
OCD Diagnosis
Your doctor may do a physical exam and blood tests to make sure something else isn’t causing your symptoms. They will
also talk with you about your feelings, thoughts, and habits.
OCD Treatment
There’s no cure for OCD. But you may be able to manage how your symptoms affect your life through medicine, therapy, or
a combination of treatments.
Treatments include:
Psychotherapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy can help change your thinking patterns. In a form called exposure and
response prevention, your doctor will put you in a situation designed to create anxiety or set off compulsions. You’ll
learn to lessen and then stop your OCD thoughts or actions.
Relaxation. Simple things like meditation, yoga, and massage can help with stressful OCD symptoms.
Medication. Psychiatric drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors help many people control obsessions and
compulsions. They might take 2 to 4 months to start working. Common ones include citalopram (Celexa), escitalopram
(Lexapro), fluoxetine (Prozac), fluvoxamine, paroxetine (Paxil), and sertraline (Zoloft). If you still have symptoms, your
doctor might give you antipsychotic drugs like aripiprazole (Abilify) or risperidone (Risperdal).
Neuromodulation. In rare cases, when therapy and medication aren’t making enough of a difference, your doctor
might talk to you about devices that change the electrical activity in a certain area of your brain. One kind, transcranial
magnetic stimulation, is FDA-approved for OCD treatment. It uses magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells. A more
complicated procedure, deep brain stimulation, uses electrodes that are implanted in your head.
TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation). The TMS unit is a non-invasive device that is held above the head to induce
the magnetic field. It targets a specific part of the brain that regulates OCD symptoms.
OCD-Related Conditions
Some separate conditions are similar to OCD. They involve obsessions with things like:
Sources
SOURCES:
National Institute of Mental Health: “Obsessive-compulsive disorder: When unwanted thoughts or irresistible actions take over” and “Obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
Mayo Clinic: “Obsessive-compulsive disorder: Symptoms & Causes;” “Obsessive-compulsive disorder: Diagnosis & treatment;” and “Cognitive behavioral therapy.”
International OCD Foundation: “What is OCD?” “How is OCD Treated?” “Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS),” “Disorders Related to OCD.”
NYU Langone Child Study Center: “Habit reversal therapy: An approach to managing repetitive behavior disorders.”
BMC Psychiatry: “Atypical antipsychotic augmentation in SSRI treatment refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis.”