Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged OCD

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
rachelramirez

ERP for OCD Works, But It's Expensive and Hard to Find - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...505538

OCD US

shared by rachelramirez on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The Only Cure for OCD Is Expensive, Elusive, and Scary
  • She can’t resist picking up litter whenever she spots it; the other day she cleaned up the entire parking lot of her apartment complex. Each night, she must place her phone in an exact spot on the nightstand in order to fall asleep.
  • Since then, a succession of therapists have failed to help her. They’ve told her, “I don't really know how to treat this,” she said. Or, they talked to her about the possible source of her troubles.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • there are no psychologists who specialize in exposure and response prevention, the specific kind of therapy she and many others with OCD require in order to break their crippling thought cycles.
  • At its worst, OCD can compel people to spend hours each day rehearsing an intricate mental dance they feel powerless to end.
  • Along with medication, exposure and response prevention, or ERP, therapy is the gold-standard treatment for people with OCD. It is radically different from more traditional talk therapy, which excavates patients’ childhoods or past relationships for clues to their present-day problems.
  • a person is forced to confront their obsessive thoughts relentlessly. The goal is to make the sufferer so accustomed to their obsessions that they no longer feel tempted to engage in soothing compulsions.
  • Because the symptoms can be entirely mental, it can take years for either patients or therapists to recognize OCD for what it is.
  • People obsessed with not offending God might hold a satanic ritual. Those assailed by persistent (and baseless) fears they will molest their siblings might read the incest tome Flowers in the Attic.
  • some studies estimate it takes OCD sufferers 17 years to find proper treatment from the onset of symptoms. Seeking certain forms of talk therapy can make them worse, not better. In the meantime, some experience symptoms so debilitating they are confined to their homes.
  • Most moderate OCD cases get at least partly better if the patient receives two or three months of ERP.
  • There is no mandatory number of hours that psychologists must spend training in either cognitive-behavioral therapy or ERP, said Lynn Bufka, a psychologist with the American Psychological Association. Bufka did not know what percentage of psychotherapists provide ERP, but she suspects it’s “small.”
  • Between 3 and 7 million Americans suffer from OCD at some point—a substantial number, but still far fewer than the vast multitudes who seek therapy for anxiety and depression.
  • ERP teaches people, “these thoughts are meaningless, you need to learn to ignore them.”
  • Access to ERP therapists is compounded by the already profound shortage of psychotherapists in rural areas. More than half of U.S. counties have no mental-health professionals at all.
  • ERP specialists might feel no need to take insurance, since they are so rare they often have no shortage of clients, Szymanski, of the International OCD Foundation, pointed out.
  • But the treatment was so expensive it contributed to the family’s decision to sell their house.
mimiterranova

Pandemic and those with OCD - 0 views

www.npr.org/...t-be-counted-after-election-da

health pandemic ocd politics Culture

shared by mimiterranova on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump is doubling down on claims that the results of the presidential election must be known on election night itself, falsely asserting "that's the way it's been and that's the way it should be."
  • The decision allows election officials in Pennsylvania to count absentee ballots received as late as Friday, as long as they are postmarked by Nov. 3.
  • The president denied that he would try to declare victory prematurely.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • But then he still raised doubts about counting votes beyond Election Day, even though in any election, it typically takes longer to count absentee ballots that by law count just the same as votes cast in person.
  • More of those ballots are being cast this year because of the pandemic.
  • Trump also suggested that voters should have mailed in their ballots well before the deadlines set by states, saying, "If people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before [Election Day]. They could have put their ballots in a month ago.
  • Americans are breaking early voting records, with more than 93 million votes already cast. Of that, 59 million mail-in ballots have been returned, with 32 million ballots still waiting to be mailed back, according to the U.S. Elections Project.
  • If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electorals, somewhere in that range, and then they're going to try to steal it back after the election," Miller said.
  • But that's not the way voting in America works.
  • For starters, no state ever reports its final results on election night.
  • "
  • Delaware, in fact, is the only state that will certify its results within the same week as Election Day. Most states will certify their results in the last two weeks of November, with some states even extending until the second week of December.
  • Election experts predicted that there would be a large increase in mail-in ballots this cycle because of concerns over the coronavirus pandemic. The increase in these absentee ballots may mean the count will take longer, particularly because election workers typically need to process each ballot by hand.
  • "The counties are staffing up, have a ton of equipment, best practices in place, and are planning, for the most part, to count 24/7 until it's done."
  • Mental health experts are worried about what the coming winter could hold as the pandemic stretches on, and socializing outdoors becomes impossible. For those with obsessive-compulsive disorder, COVID-19 brings extra challenges, but also some lessons about dealing with anxiety.
  • People with OCD often develop compulsions — those are rituals or repeated behaviors — that they use to soothe themselves when obsessions — or unwanted, repeated thoughts — pop into their brains.
  • Travis Osborne is a psychologist who specializes in OCD. When the pandemic started, he said, "It definitely made me feel really sad and concerned for some of my clients with OCD — because I just knew that, for some of them, this is going to create more work."
  • For people with OCD, their self-soothing rituals take time and interfere with their daily lives.
  • Multiple studies have shown that the pandemic is exacerbating the symptoms of some people with OCD.
  • Acknowledging anxiety and learning to live with it is a useful skill for everyone, especially during a pandemic.
rerobinson03

How the U.S. Reopening Might Affect Anxiety Patients - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...US-reopening-anxiety-ocd.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Mr. Hirshon, 54, belongs to a subset of the population that finds the everyday grind not only wearing, but also emotionally unsettling. These include people with clinical diagnoses of anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, but also run-of-the-mill introverts, who are socially uncomfortable.
  • But for people with severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, these sharp restrictions in some ways reinforced their intense impulse to withdraw.
  • A study published in February in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry looked at the mental health impact on 1,000 young people in Canada during the pandemic, and found that 70 percent of study subjects aged 6 to 18 reported some negative impact. But 19.5 percent in that age group saw some improvement, leading the authors to conclude of the impact: “Mostly worse; occasionally better.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • For some students, the return to the classroom is proving challenging because they’ve gotten accustomed to being offline. In Mountain View, Calif., an intensive therapy group is tackling teenage mental health challenges, and its participants include a new member as of mid-March: a 15-year-old who started with the group this week to try to cope with social anxiety.
  • For some adults, the pandemic provided a glimpse into just how much anxiety they were experiencing on a regular basis.
  • By contrast, the anxiety-ridden people who experienced relief during the pandemic probably are in higher income brackets, said Ms. Maikovich-Fong, the therapist from Denver. They are more likely to have jobs they can do remotely, allowing them to remain employed but with less stress than before.
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page