OCD Flashcards
With OCD, does the individual recognise that the habits are abnormal?
Yes!
With OCD, how many hours a day do you need to lose to obsessions/compulsions to meet diagnosis?
<1hr
What does it mean to have ‘egodystonic’ intrusive thoughts?
Counter to the self image of the person (ie harming a child)
In OCD, what is ‘safety behaviour’?
The things people do to manage their anxiety (ie the obsessions like washing hands)
Is it possible to have OCD without having compulsions?
Yep - 8-20% fall into this category
What’s the gender dimension to OCD at a population level?
1:1
- Childhood onset more common in males
- Some presentation differences… females more likely to do harm/checking and somatic obsessions
What’s the gender dimension to OCD at a clinical level)?
Difference in focus
Men are more likely to have a focus on sexual religious stuff
Women are more likely to focus on aggression or cleaning stuff
What is are the key co-morbidities with OCD?
There are five:
About a quarter
- major depressive disorder (MDD)
- obsessive–compulsive personality disorder (OCPD)
About one in five
- generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
- specific phobia (SP)
- Social phobia (Social Phobia)
What’s the difference between OCD and OCPD?
The latter is trait based
What % of OCD attempt suicide?
Lifetime history is 9%
What % of OCD have had suicidal ideation in the last month?
~6%
Name one of the 5 main theories of OCD aetiology
- Early childhood trauma (inc modelling by parents)
- Personality (neuroticism)
- Genetics (hSERT)
- Maybe early childhood trauma, maybe living with someone finicky about cleanliness
- Personality - neuroticism
What are the key features of Salkovskis’ (1985) cognitive model of OCD?
- Premise that intrusive thoughts are normal
- Some individuals place special meaning those thoughts, respond to them in a special way
- These responses increase vigilance for intrusive thoughts and protests the meaning of the intrusion
What are the things that shape whether an intrusive throught might become an obsession (according to Clarke and O’Conner 2005)?
There are five:
- Overly important (‘if I’m thinking this way, it must be important’);
- Highly threatening (‘if I continue to think like this, something bad will happen’);
- Requiring complete control (‘I’ve got to stop thinking this way’);
- Necessitating a high degree of certainty (‘I need to be certain that nothing bad will happen’)
- Associated with a state of perfection (‘I can’t stop thinking about this until I do it perfectly’)
What works better for OCD, drugs or therapy?
THERAPY!
