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Blog post
08.17.2023
BDD, Surgeons, and Surgery: Considerations and Questions to Ask
Surgery can be lifesaving. Surgery is often needed and can, for many conditions and situations, be a game changer. But more often than not, a surgical procedure for someone with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) will not help. It could potentially relieve the person of their symptoms for a short amount of time but it cannot treat or cure the underlying disorder.
Blog post
01.31.2024
How to Move on From a Breakup: Using "Opposite Action" to Love to Survive Valentine’s Day
Often times, people struggling to move on from a breakup inadvertently act in ways that amplify their emotions of love towards the person, but these urges usually make us feel worse in the long term. So, what can we do? Enter “Opposite Action.”
Blog post
12.20.2023
5 Tips for Using Interoceptive Exposure to Face Your Fears
Fear is one of the six basic human emotions, with a clear evolutionary purpose: to help us respond to danger and survive. In Exposure Therapy, providers create a safe environment to intentionally “expose” their clients to objects, activities, or situations they fear.
Blog post
11.21.2023
Supporting Your Child with Anxiety and/or OCD - Q&A
Experts Mona Potter, MD and Kathryn Boger, PhD, ABPP recently partnered with ADAA to host an insightful Q&A webinar addressing strategies for parenting children with anxiety and OCD. This blog to addresses the most common themes that emerged from the questions asked during the webinar.
Blog post
07.27.2023
Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Eating Disorders: Overlapping Presentations, Differing Treatments.
There can be confusion when differentiating between body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and eating disorders (EDs). They both involve pre-occupying appearance-related thoughts and repetitive behaviours, but are treated differently.
Blog post
12.06.2022
Exposures for OCD: Getting Creative
The ability to be ourselves with clients makes it so much easier to connect, to be real about how challenging treatment is, and enlist their help to ensure that whatever the exposure is, its something they can tolerate, trust in, and most importantly, begin to experience relief from their intrusive thoughts and the compulsions that may dominate their lives.
Blog post
10.13.2022
What Are the Pandemic Side Effects on Those with BDD and OCD?
The pandemic set a new era into motion. When the world went into lockdown in 2020, people learned to fear the outside and any social interaction, becoming extremely fearful of contracting the deadly virus.
Blog post
10.06.2022
Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) and Men: What to Know and How it Differs
Body Dysmorphic Disorder is an unhealthy preoccupation with not just the look, shape, or feel of one’s body or a specific part, but the shame one experiences in the appearance of their body, or a certain aspect of it, really hits the mark. BDD is a chronic condition that can be debilitating and can disrupt various aspects of the person’s day-to-day life for years.
Blog post
05.23.2022
Violating Expectations and the Metacognitive Approach
The recommendation most difficult to absorb by most clinicians is the suggestion that interventions that lower expectations of catastrophic or negative outcomes of exposure should be minimized in order to take advantage of the therapeutic effect of violating expectations. The question then arises as to how to motivate patients to do the exposure work while in the grip of serious anticipatory anxiety and suffering from the effects of their own anxiety sensitivity.
Blog post
02.01.2022
Managing COVID-19 Fears as Mental Health Professionals
Many mental health professionals are now conducting patient visits virtually. I am one of the only psychologists left in my building who has stayed behind to continue in-person work while abiding by COVID protocols. Since our practice specializes in refractory OCD spectrum disorders and anxiety disorders a lot of the work done at our outpatient clinic requires in-vivo exposures, which cannot be replicated on Zoom.
Blog post
10.28.2021
It's Not Just OCD About Physical Appearance: Understanding Body Dysmorphic Disorder
In BDD, people are tormented by obsessive thoughts associated with a part or parts of their physical appearance being flawed in some way, yet these flaws tend not to be noticeable to anyone but themselves.
Blog post
03.07.2021
The Many Masks of OCD
ADAA Member Eda Gorbis, PhD, LMFT shares information about the various forms of OCD and the best treatment options.