I give classes to a girl who has OCD. I am not a psychologist, etc., but she appears to be coping quite well. She’s a senior in high school and her marks are usually good. The main symptom of her OCD-ness is that she is constantly writing on snippets of paper. These writings consist of thoughts that she does not want to forget, things people say that she deems important, etc. She stuffs these papers into a drawer at home, and as far as I know never really consults them again.
I suggested a journal or blog or log or diary kind of thing, but she says she does not want to carry around a pad or notebook.
Anyway, she’s been seeing a psychologist for a couple of months. And yesterday , when I saw her, she told me that the psychologist had “ordered, advised, counseled, told” her, not sure which verb to use, to go cold turkey on the writing. So she hasn’t been writing anything down for the past three days.
I am wondering if this is a standard treatment for OCD… have the “patient” go cold turkey on their manifestations, like washing hands 37 times a day, etc.
It’s part of a treatment called Exposure and Response Prevention, or ERP. The exposure prevention part is where you try to limit the things that trigger the OCD behaviors. The response prevention is where you intentionally choose not to engage in the OCD behaviors once you’ve had an exposure to a triggering event.
Googling “OCD ERP therapy” will give you a lot more details.
ETA: While it is a standard treatment for OCD, not everyone suffering from OCD receives this type of therapy. I have a family member who suffers from OCD (among other things) and received cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) but not ERP. ERP is a form of CBT, but CBT doesn’t necessarily include ERP (if that makes sense).
My thinking is that this girl, OCD behaviours and all, is in equilibrium. As well, the writing is only a symptom and there is an underlying OCD thing going on which could manifest in many different ways.
In other words she will now find another habit to the feed the general OCD-ness.
The funny thing about OCD is you can get a compulsion or obsession under control, for a while. Then your brain says “oh to hell with this” and will come up with a completely new way to manifest itself. And the cycle starts over again. This type of thing can be good if the act or tic is preventing you from focusing on other things, but you just have to be prepared that just because you reign this in doesn’t mean you’re “cured”.
My daughter has OCD and this was something her therapists did with her. For one thing, they wanted to see if the disorder would re-occur in a different way (do compulsive behaviors turn into obsessive thoughts, or whatever.) For another thing, if the patient is on medication, measuring the urge is a way to determine whether it has any effect.