OCD Flashcards
What are the symptoms to look for in OCD?
Obsessions
Compulsions
What are obsessions?
Intrusive, recurring thoughts that the individual finds distressing (e.g. causing harm to someone you love)
What are compulsions?
Repetitive or ritualised behaviour patterns that the individual feels driven to perform
Can you have obsessions without compulsions?
Yeah
What forms do obsessions come in?
Words, images, and impulses
Tend to involve ideas or content that is inconsistent with your personality, moral values, ideas and goals.
What are the characteristics of obsessive thoughts?
- intrusive quality
- unwanted
- involve resistance
- uncontrollable
- uncharacteristic
Why do compulsions occur in OCD?
- to reduce the distress they feel as a result of their obsessions
- when it is repeated in the same way every time it is called a compulsion
What types of compulsion are there?
- Compulsive checking
- Compulsive washing
- Compulsive counting
- Superstitious Ritualised Movements or Thoughts (e.g. counting background til a thought has gone)
- ‘undoing’ or ‘neutralising’ a bad thought by thinking of a good or safe thought to counteract it
- Systematic arranging of objects
- Compulsive hoarding
What is the DSM-5 criteria for OCD?
- Obsessions and/or compulsions
- Interferes with functioning
- Not due to drugs/medical condition
- Not another disorder
What is the DSM-5 criteria for obsessions?
- recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges, or images that are experiences, at some time during the disturbance, as intrusive and unwanted, and that in most individuals cause marked anxiety or distress
- person attempts to ignore or suppress such thoughts or to neutralise them with some other thought or action
What is the DSM-5 criteria for compulsions?
- repetitive behaviours or mental acts that the person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly
- behaviours or mental acts are aimed at preventing or reducing anxiety or distress, or preventing some dreaded event or situation; however, these behaviours or mental acts are not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralise or prevent, or are clearly excessive
What is the worldwide prevalence for OCD?
approx 2%
What is the prevalence of OCD in the UK?
1.1%
What biological factors are there of OCD?
- Head injury
- Inability to inhibit genetically stored behaviours
What parts of the brain have been associated with OCD?
- Frontal lobes
- Basal ganglia
- but unlikely that all sufferers of OCD have similar brain injury
How can compulsions result from inability to inhibit genetically stored behaviours?
- failure in inhibitory pathway from the basal ganglia, so that genetically stored behaviours are no longer inhibited
- but how can this explain the wealth of different compulsion?
What psychological factors are there of OCD?
- Memory deficits
- inflated responsibility
- thought suppression
How do memory deficits cause OCD?
- ‘doubting’ is a central feature of OCD so may question the role of underlying memory deficits
- however ‘doubting’ seems to be a consequence of compulsive behaviour rather than a cause of it
What psychodynamic accounts are there for OCD?
- Importance of the unconscious
- Role of defence mechanisms
What is the importance of the unconscious?
- unconscious feelings and emotions: unacceptable to the self
- unconscious trauma
- these can lead to internal conflicts, if an emotion/memory is deemed unacceptable
What is the role of defence mechanisms?
- people cope with conflict using different methods
- may include avoiding the emotion, focussing the emotion on something else, and experiencing the emotion from another person
- people often seek help for the defence mechanism without realising the key issue is the unconscious conflict
- key defence in OCD may be displacing the anxiety and undoing the bad thought
Explain appraisals in OCD.
Intrustion -> Appraisal -> Behaviour
What appraisals are there in OCD?
- Thought-Action Fusion
- Inflated Responsibility
- Overestimation of Threat
- Mental Control
- Intolerance of Uncertainty
Explain thought-action fusion.
If I have a thought I will act on it. Thinking about negative events make them more likely to happen. Bad thoughts are equivalent to bad deeds