Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Treatment

Experts generally recommend cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) alone or in combination with certain medications as the best obsessive compulsive disorder treatment. Whether to use the combination of both medication and CBT as a first-line treatment depends on the severity of the obsessive compulsive disorder and the age of the patient at the beginning of obsessive compulsive disorder treatment.

For younger patients and for people with mild obsessive compulsive disorder symptoms, it is recommended that CBT be tried alone as an obsessive compulsive disorder treatment at first. However, experts generally rate combination treatment as the most beneficial obsessive compulsive disorder treatment for most patients.

If medications are successful in reducing acute obsessive compulsive disorder symptoms, then staying on the medication for an extended period of time such a year or two becomes important also. It's not a good idea to take the medication for only a couple of months and stop. Further, for people who have repeatedly gotten better from obsessive compulsive disorder and then relapsed over the course of years, lifelong obsessive compulsive disorder treatment is often recommended.

Antidepressant medications can be helpful with obsessive compulsive disorder treatment. Up to 60% of patients taking an SSRI experienced clinically significant improvements in their OCD symptoms. These gains are helpful but they are often not sufficient to eliminate the need for other forms of obsessive compulsive disorder treatment.

Possibly the best obsessive compulsive disorder treatment is a therapy technique called exposure with response prevention. If someone's OCD symptoms are so severe that they will not tolerate the exposure with response prevention, then a mental health professional may decide the use of a benzodiazepine is warranted.

For OCD, the most important aspect of cognitive-behavioral therapy is called exposure with response prevention (E/RP). In this intervention, patients are encouraged to tolerate the distress associated with their obsessive thought without performing any ritual to decrease the distress. With repeated practice, E/RP results in the patient becoming desensitized to the obsessive fear.

The patient learns he can stand to have the disturbing thought without "being imprisoned" by having to repeat certain behaviors to neutralize the negative thought. CBT also helps patients challenge the importance of their thoughts and dispute their need for certainty, sense of over-responsibility, and exaggerated estimates of danger.

For example, a person who washes his hands 75 times per day might do so to relieve the anxious feelings derived from the thought that having germs on their hands may cause illness and death. Each time the person washes his hands, he does feel better, temporarily, until the obsessive thought occurs again. To help this individual, E/RP therapy would actually have the person get his hands dirty and then not wash them.