Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a common, chronic and long-lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts and behaviors that he or she feels the urge to repeat over and over. They might experience symptoms such as fear of germs or contamination, unwanted forbidden thoughts involving sex, religion, and harm, aggressive thoughts towards others or self, having things symmetrical or in a perfect order, excessive cleaning and handwashing, ordering and arranging things in a precise way, repeatedly checking on things, such as repeatedly checking to see if the door is locked or that the oven is off, and compulsive counting. If left untreated OCD can affect all aspects of life.

Over the past three decades, obsessive-compulsive disorder has moved from an almost untreatable, life-long psychiatric disorder to a highly manageable one. This is a great change to the 1%-3% of children and adults with this disorder thanks to advances in both pharmacological and psychological therapies, for those suffering with OCD is pretty good in the long term, even though most have other disorders that can also cause other problems. We still have far to go, however, until OCD can be described as either easily treatable or the other treatments are widely known by a lot of doctors.. This review focuses on the current state of the treatment for OCD and where we still are coming up short in our work as a scientific community. For example, while the impact of medications is very very strong for adults in reducing OCD symptoms, current drugs are only somewhat effective for children. There are unacceptably high relapse rates across both populations when treated with pharmacological alone. Even in the cognitive-behavioral treatments, which show higher effect sizes and lower relapse rates than drug therapies, drop-out rates are at a quarter of those who begin treatment. This means almost all of the OCD population who do really good treatments that are supposed to actually work, which seems to be only a small bit of the overall population,are not effectively treated. Suggestions for future ways of research are also shown to us. These are mainly focused on 1: increased dissemination of effective therapies. 2: augmentation of treatments for those with symptoms that keep coming back, both for psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy. And 3: the impact of comorbid disorders on treatment outcomes.

OCD is a disease that will haunt the lives of many in many years to come. There have been many cures as well as medicines to help contain the compulsions of life and everything around them. People with this disease report it being the most annoying thing that anyone could ever go through, saying Imagine having to go through your everyday life constantly having to touch, grab, and saying things multiple times just for you to be able to move because your mind is telling you, that you cannot move unless it is done. Having to deal with that day in and day out would be torture as it is explained by many patients with OCD. There are people out in the world today who have to deal with this chronic and long-lasting disease until a proper treatment can be found.

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